Welcome to the GitFit Guys, quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up.

My name is Ben Greenfield. I'm the GitFit Guy, and in today's episode, you're going to discover how to customize your diet.

Diets suck, which is probably why I've never written a diet book, and also why I think most

diet books are silly marketing ploys. Why? Well, most diets involve a one-size-fits-all approach

that paints an entire population with a broad nutritional brush without taking into consideration

genetic individuality, personal health history, nutrient, vitamin, and mineral holes that need to be

addressed, et cetera. Take the currently popular ketogenic diet, for example. This very high,

fat, very low-carb diet is championed by exercise enthusiasts as the perfect way to lose weight,

enhance cognition, increase endurance, and beyond. And it does indeed work for these goals.

Now, for enhanced endurance,

I personally followed a strict ketogenic diet for years while racing Ironman triathlon,

and I wrote a whole story on it. I'll occasionally use ketogenic diets or ketosis as a brain boosting strategy on mentally difficult days. In the show notes for this podcast, if you go to

quick and dirty tips.com and look for this episode, episode number 341, I'll put links to stories

that I've written in detail of my own experience with both of those efforts. But when reviewing

the blood work and biomarkers on the lab tests of my clients and people for which I do health and nutrition consults, notably people who are following one of these

ketogenic diets, I've witnessed concerningly high levels of LDL cholesterol, skyrocketing over

400, along with high triglycerides, which can be a risk factor for heart disease and serious

liver issues and high inflammation. So how could this be?

Well, basically there's a condition called, brace yourself, familial hypercholesteremia. And that

affects up to 10% of people worldwide. People with this condition tend to experience a metabolic

firestorm in response to a high fat diet because cholesterol and inflammatory markers

increased dramatically. In response to foods like coconut oil diet because cholesterol and inflammatory markers increased dramatically

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