julymorning said...
Psilociraptor said...
High cholesterol has little to do with cholesterol in your diet. Dyslipidemias are direct consequences of infection and inflammatory stress. Your body synthesizes cholesterol and VLDL in excess to sequester fat soluble bacterial "toxins" and excrete them. The reason you get it from dietary choices has more to do with selectively feeding gut microbiota and increasing inflammation than direct metabolism. So Lyme doesn't skew it, it causes it because that is how the body responds to infection.
I tend to believe that because there is no rhyme or reason with mine bouncing up into flag range and then down again for awhile, and then back up again.......
HOWEVER, how is that explained for people that don't have Lyme? Are those people feeding some kind of inflammation too?Yes. Like i said about
diet... most people in the first world eat a highly inflammatory diet saturated with refined calories and little phytochemistry. This has many consequences but a relevant one here is that by eating refined diets you selectively feed oral and intestinal microbiota at the expense of others. So lets say you eat a vegetable full of complex carbs, polyphenols, terpenes, etc. All that differentially effects the microbes in your gut. In that mix are prebiotics for beneficial strains, antibiotics for other strains, things that don't kill but simply inhibit replication of opportunistic strains, things that alter their behavior, etc and promote overall balance in the gut ecology as determined by our evolutionary three way relationship with food, microbes and ourselves. Now let's compare that to an artificial food that contains abnormal levels of saturated fats. You're basically turning your gut into a culture dish for fat metabolizing microorganisms and compromising species diversity by starving others. These strains will overgrow, generate local inflammation which will degrade the intestinal lining, and they will be absorbed into the blood stream where they generate systemic inflammation (leaky gut). Gum disease will do the same thing. Just like lyme many of them will attempt to poke through the vascular endothelium to seek immune privileged tissues and immune cells will chase them into the vessel wall and initiate plaque formation possibly as a form of containment for the release of inflammatory cytokines which could be damaging to organs if left circulating at high levels. We know less about
the actual process of how cholesterol/LDL/HDL play into this. But we know that inflammation upregulates cholesterol synthesis, vldl synthesis and lipase activity which causes a distribution of endotoxin between lipoproteins. The ultimate consequence is HDL returning to the liver full of neutralized endotoxin which gets pumped into the bile and ends up in your toilet where its inflammatory terror ends.
So yes, those non-lyme people have inflammation too. Which is why our rates of autoimmune diseases are like 1/6, 1/3-2/3 lifetime risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death etc. Now the confusing part is that your lipid panels are going to change every time you eat a meal. This whole system basically traffics fats of all kinds. I'm not saying that a sausage breakfast won't change your blood lipids. But that's not where your risk for vascular disease comes from. We just simply don't really understand enough about
the actual mechanisms to rightfully interpret the blood work. But we can identify some unhealthy patterns and do know that fat and cholesterol metabolism itself is not the issue (except maybe as a function of how it feeds your microbes). I just found this cool paper in fact that talks about
plaque rupture... Apparently due to biofilms http://mbio.asm.org/content/5/3/e01206-14.full So yeah, all just a part of the human ecology
Post Edited (Psilociraptor) : 2/23/2017 5:41:39 AM (GMT-7)