Featured Image Credit: Getty Stock Images
Topics: Food and Drink, Health
Britt Jones
A man decided to test his body by taking on a vegan diet, and the results were surprising, to say the least.
Nick Norwitz, a Harvard medical student and YouTuber, shared with his followers his experiment on himself after switching from being on a near-carnivore diet (all meat,) to a vegan diet.
Whilst many people claim that a carnivore diet, which consists of eating only animal-based products like dairy, meat and eggs, comes with many health benefits, as do vegans with their own.
For Norwitz, he added another element to his experiment which included making his vegan diet keto (carbohydrate free) to test his own reaction to such an extreme change.
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Once it was over, he shared the results with his 129,000 subscribers, and you’ll be shocked too.
The 25-year-old shared that the vegan lifestyle upset his stomach, which he had experienced during previous attempts to go vegan.
“Honestly, my stomach got pretty upset on the vegan diet,” Norwitz said. “That’s just me, and my biology and microbiome.”
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The student explained that his gut microbiome probably just didn’t agree with it, but he decided to stick with it so that he could test out his LDL cholesterol levels to see how they changed during his eating transition.
However, it only took a week of consuming vegan protein powders, green vegetables, tofu, and some dark chocolate (naughty) to see a very stark difference.
Even though he lost weight 4.2lbs (1.90kg) on the vegan-keto diet, his cholesterol levels increased by a whopping 14 percent.
He said: “Despite eating less total fat, less saturated fat, more fiber and zero cholesterol on the vegan diet, my total LDL cholesterol actually went up.”
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While he expected it to increase, he did not think it would be so much in such a short space of time.
Norwitz hadn’t even been consuming cholesterol in his diet, and instead had been eating more fibre and less saturated fats compared.
So, what happened?
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He explained that the increase in cholesterol was due to the weight loss and calorie decrease.
He shared that whilst eating a carnivore diet, he would eat 3,479 calories a day. But as a vegan keto, he only ate 2,054 per day, taking him into a calorie deficit.
He explained it by sharing to his viewers: "The leaner the person is, the higher their LDL goes up, all things being equal."
Norwitz went on to say that there were other scientific studies which show that a person's LDL cholesterol levels increase when they reach the lean category in BMI charts.
He said: “Analyses have shown that leaner populations with BMIs less than 25 see increases in LDL,” he said. “The leaner the person is, the higher their LDL goes up, all things being equal.”
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This is particularly true when they go from a carb-burning to a fat-burning diet.
The student explained: "When lean people shift from carb-burning to fat burning, the liver makes more cholesterol containing particles to traffic around that fuel, glucose, to fuel muscles. The leaner you are and the more active you are, the greater the demands on this system and the higher your LDL goes up on a ketogenic diet."
He then said that saturated fats and cholesterol consumption have a ‘meagre’ impact on LDL cholesterol.
The YouTuber stressed that he wants his audience to ‘think more deeply’ about their bodies' and that having an ‘everlasting metabolic curiosity’ will benefit them in the long run.