Tuesday, March 01, 2011

Ratty at a year

Ratty, about a year old, 410gm. Ad lib high fat diet, mostly portions of our food. Lots of lard, probably not diabetic! He is very, very strong for his size and can open the cage door after I bent the door clip tighter. Now he sleeps in rat Alcatraz overnight.



Peter

Oh, and here he is with Ping in the background...

15 comments:

Stephan Guyenet said...

Thanks for the update!

Paul Jaminet said...

May I suggest Dong Po's Pork for the birthday dinner? I've never known a rat to turn it down.

Peter said...

I might join him in that, mmmm

Unknown said...

Woah, I want pics of the little Rat Alcatraz.

Aaron Blaisdell said...

I need to get my rats off of their SAD rat diet and onto a hyperlipid diet full of natural fats. Maybe they'd perform even better on tests of cognition!

Stephen Boulet said...

I worry that Ratty might become part of Catty's high fat ad libitum diet.

John said...

hey there!

My total cholesterol is 250, HDL is 85, and ldl is 165. My fasting blood glucose is always around 65-70. Is the cholesterol anything to be worried about. I know the high hdl is great, but what about the high LDL?

J Boat

Paul Jaminet said...

John Boat,

I'm doing a blog post about high LDL next week. Your LDL looks probably 50-60 points too high. You're probably mildly malnourished - copper deficiency most likely. Yes, you should worry enough to fix it. No, you should not panic. Visit the vitamin aisle, or eat beef liver.

Good news is your HDL is excellent and you're not far from minimum mortality LDL. Should be an easy fix.

Fasting blood glucose is rather low - do you eat a lot of carbs? If not that could be another issue. Infections can cause both low fasting glucose and high LDL.

Best, Paul

John said...

Carbs are at about 150 grams a day (though they were at about 200-300 for a while when I was gaining weight...read below). I am 5 10 and was weighing only 120, and recently gained up to 145 since this past summer so I was underweight/malnourished for a while. Could the weight gain in that time attribute to the rise in cholesterol? This past june my total was 160 with hdl at 75, ldl at 75, and vldl at 10.

I have had colonic inertia most of my life so it has been hard for me to eat a lot of food. Being constipated all the time could also allow for further absorption of bile salts and other thing in the colon, then going back to the liver and increasing cholesterol (or so I have read).

I have been weight stable for only about 4 weeks now at 145 so maybe with time the ldl will level out?

My food right now consists of grass fed butter, eggs, kefir, yogurt, red meats, fatty fish, liver, coconut oils/milk, some white rice, some yams, veggies (raw and fermented), and a serving of fruit now and then. Supplements are digestive enzymes, vitamin D a few times a week, NAC, milk thistle, and protein powder.

Peter said...

Andrew and Stephen, we just wedge his cage in a bookshelf with the door hard against the wooden end. Before we realised he was escaping we had thought our son was opening the door to feed or play with him. During this time he was out and about all night with Ping without problem and accumulated multiple cat toys in his bedding. Must be a toxo carrier in his brain!

Aaron, it takes a pretty dedicated self destructive outlook to eat anything as remotely awful as the sucrose based high fat diets a lot of rats have to live on...

Anti, He's always had siamese points and has a slightly rough coat. Not our prettiest rat ever!

John, unless you have a specific nutrient problem or hormonal issue to address then worrying about your LDL is bad for you without any benefit per unit stress. You are really supposed to worry about sdLDL, or was that oxLD?. Or perhaps agLDL? (aggregated LDLmight be a real issue but has nothing to do with a calculated LDL estimate). Of course there is always that lethal purple spotted LDL. I guess I'm not the person to ask about cholesterol levels! It sounds like you eat Food....

Peter

Paul Jaminet said...

Hi John,

Your diet sounds good. Supplement list might be improvable.

I did put my posts up:
Low Carb Paleo, and LDL is Soaring – Help!

Answer Day: What Causes High LDL on Low-Carb Paleo?

As Peter says, don't stress about it! Your constipation sounds a more pressing problem.

Peter said...

Hi again John,

Your chronic constipation might possibly be IBS related. You might want to get yourself HLA B27 tested, especially if you have arthritis/lumbar spinal issues. Complete starch/disaccharide elimination for a month might be cheaper than the blood test (might be quicker too). Also some HLA B27 negative people still respond well to starch elimination. About 5% of people from tropical backgrounds are starch intolerant via the HLA B27 mechanism. For northern areas it can rise to 60% of the population...

Peter

blogblog said...

Hi John,
if get your cabs below 20g/day you should notice a huge difference.

Basically you should eat 2g of fat for every gram of protein. That will give you a 78% fat:22% protein ratio.

Dr. B G said...

'Must be a toxo carrier in his brain!'

*haaa aha!!* Rat's are so CLEVER and easily trained -- I had a baby rat in jr high and he could pull a chain, get into a basket, swing to a ledge, and complete a little maze for treats (on a rat chow diet, if it was a hyperlipid diet... who knows? he could've done brain surgery)

Ryne said...

Peter, a question regarding the starch/disaccharide-free SCD diet: to get a reasonable amount of carbs eating this way I've been using bananas and raisins mixed with a lot of butter, but then fructose starts to creep up into the 30-50 g/d range.

Do you think it's a reasonable trade off to expose the liver to more fructose but less endotoxin (considering the SCD would be starving a good deal of gut bacteria)? If one of big problems with fructose is that it increases endotoxin absorption (from your "Cirrhosis and fructose" post) then I would imagine that the SCD bypasses at least this issue...