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My apologies to folks who hate long posts. Hopefully you're someone who is sympathetic to veganism and loves a good mystery becuase I've got one for you. So a few weeks ago, in desperation, I went to a naturopath to try and figure out what was going on with me. I'd been experiencing severe anxiety and depression as well as almost total lack of motivation or initiative. While at the naturopath's I got a comprehensive metabolic blood test done and my cholesterol level came back as 120 mg/dl. This is great for my risk of heart disease but what I didn't realize is that having too little cholesterol is correlated with anxiety and depression -- and even violence and suicide. While 120 mg/dl might be fine for some people with metabolisms that can handle it I don't appear to be one of those people. This relationship between cholesterol and mood is likely because cholesterol is a precursor for hormones like cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline which, among other things, are necessary for a healthy stress response. Now I recognize that most cholesterol, even for meat eaters, is produced in one's liver. For a typical amerikan only 15% comes from eating cholesterol directly; of course for vegans all cholesterol must be produced internally. My naturopath wants me to consume fish oil. I'm willing to do this if I absolutely have to but I'd rather figure out a way to address this while remaining vegan. So far my strategy has been to increase my intake of saturated fat, essential nutrients and calories in general. So I'm eating a lot of coconut oil, avocado and nuts. I'm also taking a good multivitamin and I'm drinking some gotu kola tea every day. (According to the Prescription for Nutritional Healing gotu kola is contraindicated if one has high cholesterol because it raises cholesterol levels.) I'm also taking spirulina and eating walnuts on my NP's advice. This advice is somewhat counterintuitive because walnuts, spirulina and avocado are all supposed to lower one's cholesterol! My NP claims that this is really only true if you have high cholesterol and that these things will actually promote homeostasis. Is this one of those counterintuitive truths that people love? Or is it bullsh*t? I don't really know. So today I just did another, at home, cholesterol test. This test is supposed to be 97% accurate. Well it came back literally off the charts again. The test comes with a little key to translate one's score (0-50) on the device to one's cholesterol level (120-400) in reality. Because my score was below where the key starts I called the company to help me determine where I was at. The best we could come up with was that my cholesterol today was at or below 100! Any thoughts? Thanks so much.
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