Jerry wants to know how would someone who is plant-based still have high cholesterol?

There are plant-based sources of saturated fat, specifically coconut oil, and that's been kind of trendy of late.

If coconut oil has kind of snuck into your diet, just know that that plant-based, or saturated fat, can in fact potentially increase and worsen your cholesterol levels.

Well, hello there, and welcome to the Exam Room Podcast, brought to you by the Physicians Committee.

Hi, I am the Weight Loss Champion, Chuck Carroll. Thank you so very much for giving the show a listen, or a view, or a download, wherever it is in the world that you are.

We appreciate the fact that you are here.

Gonna be kind of a quick hitting fast show today, but it's a show filled with all kinds of questions and answers guaranteed to raise our collective nutrition IQs.

Today we are going to be opening up the Doctors' Mailbag with Doctors Vanita Ramon and Dr. Jazz. Dr. Jazzmolt Sardana.

These are answers to your questions and great questions they are. Today we are going to be talking about intermittent fasting and weight loss. We are going to be talking about diet myths. What's true? What's not?

Bad diets, weight loss, nutrients, best foods, worst foods, and we are also going to be breaking down coconut oil and palm oil, or no oil at all.

Is there such a thing as a healthy oil? We are going to be getting into that with the Doctors as well, plus we are going to be getting a check on health headlines, including a look at a meat packing plant out in Colorado that is now having a second outbreak of coronavirus cases among its employees.

Gonna be talking about that in just a little bit, but first let's go ahead and raise our nutrition IQs together, as we open up the Doctors' Mailbag with Doctors Ramon and Sardana.

Dr. Ramon, let's start with you today. This first question is about intermittent fasting and it comes to us from Lana. She wants to know, should we use intermittent fasting for optimal health or will it cause muscle loss?

This is such a hot topic right now. I'm glad you're asking this Lana. There's been a lot of research done on it. Let me start by saying we're still learning more about intermittent fasting, but there is some evidence that it can be effective and weight loss, maybe in lowering blood glucose levels.

However, we're also getting some other research showing that it doesn't really make a difference. For example, a research study came out of UCSF, School of Medicine recently that showed that intermittent fasting didn't lead to any different levels of weight loss compared to not fasting.

The jury is still out, but I think here's the most important thing about intermittent fasting. First of all, think of it as an adjunct to eating a healthy low fat plant based diet. That's the most important thing we can do for our health.

Intermittent fasting is just a little bit of extra if you want to do it. If you're going to do it, make sure that you restrict the time that you eat towards the earlier part of the day rather than the latter half of the day.

Thank you for that. Next question. We're going to go over to Dr. Jazz for this one. Dr. Sardana, this question comes to us from Jerry. Jerry wants to know how would someone who is plant based still have high cholesterol?

Yes, so we see this often, not too often, but I have seen it in our clinic where patients are vegan, our plant based and still are puzzled by their lipid profiles that they get.

To those patients I often ask and I wonder, there are the reasons why LDL or bad cholesterol as we call it is raised. Oftentimes it's related to the saturated fat that we find in meat, in dairy and cheese products.

There are however plant based sources of saturated fat, specifically coconut oil. That's been trendy of late coconut oil can do all sorts of things. If coconut oil has snuck into your diet, just know that that plant based source of saturated fat can, in fact, potentially increase in worsen your cholesterol levels and specifically your LDL.

I would ask them to take a really good look at your diet and make sure that you're not getting any plant based sources of saturated fat. Dr. Ramon, let's follow up with that.

...