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Comment by a1k0n | Hacker News Reader

I would wager this is almost certainly why his cholesterol dropped and explains many of the effects. This is basically the central premise of the book The China Study, which is what convinced me to go vegetarian myself about a year ago (I dropped 30 lbs without even trying in about three months and now I weigh less than I did in high school).

Still, he's eating a lot of refined sugar, so I'm pretty surprised. Then again, so am I (thanks Halloween!).

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>I would wager this is almost certainly why his cholesterol dropped and explains many of the effects.

His cholesterol dropped because he went from a consuming more calories than he burned to a diet where he was burning more calories than he ate. The excess calories were converted into fat and transported in LDL-labeled packets to the adipocytes. Once he started losing weight, adipocytes started releasing fat in smaller HDL-labeled packets for the liver to convert to glucose to meet his energy needs.

Not all excessive calories are converted into fat. It all depends on blood glucose level, and liver/muscle glycogen storage levels and the level of activity after the meals.

Glycogen isn't excess. There's a fairly fixed upper bound to your glycogen stores. In fact there's a whole class of glycogen storage diseases which are very life-limiting, all due to excess storage (inadequate storage would be lethal in utero). Calories burned through activity are by definition not excess. I suppose you could argue that in diabetics with blood sugar above 200, then yes, the sugars become an osmotic diuretic and they literally pee out the calories, but otherwise, excess calories go to fat. Fat is the ultimate, infinite sink in this equilibrium equation.

This is basically the central premise of the book The China Study, which is what convinced me to go vegetarian myself

You may also be interested to read the impressive critique of the China Study, which is based on Colin Campbell's own data:

http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fal...

which is what convinced me that my diet, which contains a fair amount of meat, poultry, eggs and seafood is the way to go.

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