Dietary taboos for high triglycerides

Foods with excessive amounts of added sugar, foods with a high proportion of bad fats, and any alcoholic beverages - don't listen to the messy online chatter about what you can't eat and what you can't touch. Control these three categories first, and 80% of people's indicators will drop.

To be honest, I have been doing nutrition consulting for almost 6 years, and I have met at least hundreds of people with excessive triglycerides, and more than half of them did not eat fat. Uncle Zhang downstairs used to eat vegetables with porridge and even dare not touch egg yolks because he was afraid of high blood lipids. As a result, his triglycerides during physical examination were three times higher than the normal value. The root cause was that he drank two large bowls of eight-treasure porridge with candied dates and raisins every morning and evening. Not only did it make the glutinous rice rise, but the extra sugar was directly converted into triglycerides in the liver. Drinking it raised triglycerides faster than eating two pieces of fat. Interestingly, there have been disagreements in the academic community on this point: in the early years, the guidelines always focused on the saturated fat limit. In recent years, more and more evidence-based evidence shows that free sugar is more than twice as effective as saturated fat in raising triglycerides. Now many nutritionists will first ask patients whether they like to drink sweet foods or porridge. Instead, they will not tell people to give up fat meat right away.

Believe it or not, a cup of full-sugar iced milk tea bought casually in the summer can contain 45 grams of added sugar, which is twice as much as the daily intake limit of 25 grams recommended by the WHO. If you drink it, your triglycerides will rise by 0.5% on the same day. -1mmol/L, not to mention the sticky millet porridge that the elderly love to drink, the fruity yogurt that children love to drink, and the coconut cola on the table during holidays. These invisible sugar pits are much harder to prevent than the obvious fat.

Don’t think that everything will be fine if you quit sugar. There are also many fat pitfalls. There is no unified standard answer here: the traditional view suggests that all animal fats should be avoided. Now more research is saying that the limits should be on "bad fats" - such as old oil repeatedly used for frying dough sticks, trans fats such as shortening in bread and cakes, and excessive saturated fats, such as eating fatty meat with oily bites, chicken skin and duck skin. As for Omega3 in deep-sea fish and monounsaturated fatty acids in olive oil, they can actually help lower triglycerides. A patient once said that he ate salmon every day to keep healthy, and the results showed that the more he ate, the higher his index was. When I asked him, he found out that he had to eat two tablespoons of sweet salad dressing every time he ate it, which contained more trans fat than French fries. No matter how much salmon he ate, he couldn't resist it. There are also nuts that many people think are healthy. The fat of a handful of pistachios is almost equal to a spoonful of cooking oil. Just eat 10 or 8 nuts every day. I once had a friend who ate half a catty of walnuts every day in order to supplement his brain. After three months of eating, his triglycerides doubled. Don’t use “healthy food” as a free ticket to death.

When it comes to alcohol, the controversy is even greater. There are always elders who say "drink less red wine to soften blood vessels", but for people with already high triglycerides, even a small glass of red wine will interfere with the liver's lipid metabolism and increase the efficiency of triglyceride synthesis. I met a middle-level employee of a state-owned enterprise who paid special attention to his diet. He only dared to eat one piece of braised pork, and drank 2 taels of rice wine for every dinner. As a result, his triglyceride levels were stuck at 3mmol/L for more than half a year and could not be lowered. After listening to my advice, he stopped drinking, and it dropped to the normal value of 1.7mmol/L in just half a month. Of course, if your indicator is only slightly higher and you don't have the habit of drinking alcohol, it's not a big deal to drink half a glass of beer occasionally on important occasions. Just don't drink it every day.

In fact, there is no need to think of eating as a punishment. Triglycerides are essentially "spare energy" stored by the body. If you eat more than you consume, it will accumulate in the blood. When I give guidance to users, I never tell them to completely avoid food. For example, if you want to eat braised pork occasionally, you can do it. As long as you reduce the amount of rice by one-third and walk briskly for 40 minutes after eating to burn off the excess energy, it will not have any impact on the indicators at all. On the contrary, I don’t dare to eat or touch anything every day. If I’m in a bad mood and my metabolism is messed up, my indicators may even go up.

To put it bluntly, there is nothing that must not be eaten. There are only three types of food: don’t touch them all the time and don’t touch them too much. Keep your mouth shut and take two more steps at the same time. It is more effective than any dietary taboo.