[sam2426679]

I discovered that I had high cholesterol about 9 months ago. My LDL was 191, when it should be 100 (or lower).

I met with a nutritionist at UCSF who boiled it down to a simple (although not necessarily easy) dietary rule, which is that I could only eat 8 or fewer grams of saturated fat per day. That's the only metric that I've been monitoring, and I've brought my LDL number down to 120 as of my most recent test.

This is all without medication. I will also note that I have been exercising more and lost 30 pounds.

p.s. An egg has ~1.5g saturated fat. So, in my case, I usually eat just egg whites because eating 2 whole eggs for breakfast would put me above the rough estimate of 2.7g per meal (3 meals per day).

[Buttons840]

Are you me? I recently had 194 LDL-C. I panicked and switched to a plant based diet. About 10 days in I paid for another lab test -- my LDL-C dropped 60 points in 10 days. I've returned to eating some lean meat, but I've learned my lesson about saturated fat.

8 grams is very low. Do you count everything? Do you count nuts? Do you count oatmeal? Do you count potatoes? I was aiming for 5g of saturated fat while only tracking high fat items, but once I logged everything using a diet app I found I got a lot of saturated fat from things like oatmeal. When I really track everything 13g is my current limit, and it's much more reasonable and matches the ADA recommendations.

[sam2426679]

For the first month, I religiously counted/tracked everything and was regularly below that 8g target.

While I no longer methodically track the data, I remain fastidious with what I eat. For example, "Mush" brand oatmeal is very tasty imo, and it only contains 0.5-1.0g for the flavors that I eat. Like you, I've also added more plant-based foods to my diet. I'm a big fan of "Credo" brand queso, which has 0g due to using cashews as the dairy-substitute.