 Today, we are going to go over blood work, how it can help identify iron overload issues, and whether or not high cholesterol is okay in the context of the carnivore diet. Just to recap, my health started greatly declining in February of 2018 after I spent two weeks out in California filming the show Masterchef. I slept one night the whole week, half a night, and after I came back, my insomnia never got better, I never slept well again. My health deteriorated further and further for almost two years until late 2019 where I discovered that my liver was overloaded with iron. The main markers we're looking at today are cholesterol, triglycerides, iron markers, and liver inflammation. The most important thing I've learned in the past year is that high cholesterol on any diet might not be healthy, regardless of the context, regardless of the high fat, as many keto dieters and cornivores are telling you. Cholesterol can be a marker of inflammation, particularly in the presence of large amounts of omega 6 fatty acids as well as altered metabolic function from agrochemicals and pollutants in the food supply, especially liver damage, some sort of functional problem with your liver. In order to sell you low quality animal products and feedlot meat, keep you on the carnivore diet. They have to convince you that high cholesterol is okay, that iron overload doesn't really exist, and I won't know this for sure until I'm able to eat large amounts of fat again, get some lipid panel tests, but that might not be for a year, that might not be for two years. I don't know when my liver is going to be healed because when I consume fat, it releases bile that's full of iron and makes me feel like crap. That's why I've been eating mostly honey as my source of energy the past few months. What I can't say is that many people eat super high fat diets, 70, 80% fat, and they have low cholesterol. Other people like myself, not so much, my cholesterol is sky high. I have a general idea of what other factors play in here, but my initial advice to anyone out there is to find a diet you feel good on, make sure nutrients are synergistic, make sure inflammation is absent, and that will usually lead to a normal lipid panel. So throughout most of my carnivore diet history, I've had that elevated high cholesterol. Even before I was carnivore, my cholesterol was on the high end. And my speculation is that I've had some degree of iron overload as well as liver damage from acutane that has been compounding for years and years and years. The first thing I wanted to show is how much your cholesterol can change from week to week, even on a high fat carnivore diet. On December 8th, 2017, my cholesterol was 441, triglycerides 107, LDL 377. Any doctor would have a heart attack just looking at numbers that high. On December 21st, 2017, less than two weeks later, my cholesterol was 336, triglycerides 161, LDL 266, over a 25% decrease in cholesterol over that short period of time. So why are we even using these markers if there's such a variance? One year later on December 18th, 2018, my cholesterol and triglycerides were around the same, 319, 157, and LDL was 240, so not really much of a change from the prior year. One year after that, December 30th, 2019, my cholesterol started lowering slightly, likely because I started addressing my iron overload issue. I had a bit of a spike in triglycerides from combining carbohydrates and fat. Cholesterol 288, triglycerides 268, and LDL 176. Around three months later, on February 20th, 2020, my cholesterol dropped even further, at 222, with triglycerides at 63, and LDL at 152, actually in the healthy range by modern standards. Now, July 30th, 2020, my cholesterol is at an all-time low, 124, with triglycerides at 130, and LDL at 63, probably lower than a lot of vegans, yet I'm still eating around two pounds of red meat per day. The other important markers to look at over this period of time are ferritin, which can indicate liver inflammation from iron storage, and the AST slash ALT numbers, which measure inflammation in the body and liver specifically. These numbers improved correspondingly with my lowering in cholesterol. So October 19th, 2019, is when I discovered the iron overload. I saw my iron numbers were over the high end, my ferritin was elevated, but more severely, my liver function was very compromised. AST at 150, and ALT at 336, and that 336 had me really concerned as it was dangerously high, and I immediately started donating blood, giving blood every week for the next several months. December 30th, 2019, my ferritin was down to 19 from 470, which meant I was done with donating blood for a little bit. Generally speaking, you want the ferritin to stay below 30. By February 20th, 2020, just under three months later, my liver numbers had improved, AST going down to 141, ALT at 218, still a bit high. My iron numbers still weren't looking that good, but the ferritin was still very low, so my liver should still be detoxing the iron. In order for your liver to remove iron, you need to donate blood, because the blood is composed of iron and copper, so if you have an adequate amount of red blood cells, the liver doesn't really need to use iron for anything, so it just stores it. Once you remove that blood by donating or getting a phlebotomy, then the liver can release that iron, make more red blood cells, and you'll start feeling better. July 30th, just yesterday, my liver numbers are finally normal. AST at 33, and ALT at 27. Ferritin is above 30 at 48, which isn't a problem for most people, but I definitely want to donate blood once or twice in the next month or so. It seems as if my liver function is starting to restore itself, so I should be feeling much better by the end of this year. Granted, I keep the same diet and continue to donate blood. I double-checked my vitamin D3 markers just to make sure I was getting enough sun, calcitriol, and vitamin D hydroxy, calcitriol being the active hormone and the other form being the storage from the sun or supplements. You want to measure both to make sure you're getting enough magnesium to activate the vitamin D3. And there are definitely some more blood markers that I'm going to get tested in another two or three months, probably some more iron blood work, and just to double-check the liver numbers. I did want to do a testosterone experiment with the testicles, but that might impede me healing my liver. Testicles are very high in zinc, and that can throw off copper, and you need copper to regulate iron in the body. That's the primary reason the carnivore diet didn't work for me. It doesn't have enough copper, so I started supplementing copper about eight milligrams per day for two months, and that fixed a lot of my sleeping issues and made me feel a lot better. So I don't really want to do that testicle experiment because of the high zinc content. That being said, I don't only have to do it for a week or two, but we'll see. So thank you guys for joining me today. Hopefully you can rub this in some people's faces saying that carnivores have bad blood work. And I did get my testosterone checked, too. The numbers are in the moderate range since I haven't been doing the testicles or anything. You guys know how to support me down in the description below. I hope you enjoy the rest of your Friday.