How to Lower Your Cholesterol Fast in Time for Blood Tests

What if you could lower your cholesterol fast — in a matter of days — just in time for your lipid blood tests? What if you could do it naturally, just by eating more fat?

That’s a ridiculous idea. It would go against every piece of dietary advice about cholesterol that the government and most doctors have pushed for the last 60 years. Fat is supposed to raise your cholesterol and give you a heart attack, not lower it. To lower your cholesterol, the American Heart Association says you’re supposed to cut out saturated fat and eat lots of whole grains, fruits, cereal, vegetable oils, and the leanest cuts of meat possible.

Of course, if you’ve been following Bulletproof for a while, you know that cholesterol is not the artery-clogging molecule it’s made out to be. You’re better off making sure your inflammation and blood triglycerides are low instead of trying to lower your cholesterol.

And according to some powerful experiments by software engineer-turned-biohacker Dave Feldman, you can actually increase and decrease your cholesterol at will. It all depends on how much fat you eat — and, directly against mainstream dietary knowledge, the correlation is inverted. In other words, eating more fat will actually lower your cholesterol.

Here’s how Feldman learned to control his cholesterol numbers, and how you can do the same. Use his technique below to experiment on yourself and lower your cholesterol numbers so you can “ace” your lab work blood tests. You shouldn’t have to pay a premium for your life insurance policy simply because you follow a high-fat, low-carb diet.

Eating fat really lowers your cholesterol

Feldman has developed a protocol for raising and lowering his cholesterol over the course of a few days. By changing his fat intake, Feldman has manipulated his LDL (“bad”) cholesterol numbers to be as low as 98 and as high as 368 (that’s mg/dL). Here’s some of his data:

You can see a clear relationship:

• Eating less fat = higher LDL cholesterol
• Eating more fat = lower LDL cholesterol

Of course, this was an N=1 experiment, meaning there’s only one subject in his experiment. It’s possible that Feldman is unusual. He thought the same thing, so he shared his data and sent an open invitation to people to try the protocol for themselves. As of now, more than 50 people have followed Feldman’s experiment. Virtually all of them reported the same results (it’s worth noting that they’ve all been on a high-fat, low-carb diet).

These data directly contradict everything mainstream doctors have said about cholesterol for the last 60 years. How is that possible?

Why eating more fat lowers your cholesterol

Low-density lipoproteins (LDL) do a lot of different things, including carry cholesterol, but their main job is to distribute energy from fat.

LDL particles are like buses: they pick up bundles of energy-rich fat called triglycerides from your liver, carry them into your bloodstream, and drop them off wherever cells need fuel.

You can get triglycerides from two places:

• Triglycerides from food. When you’re eating a lot of fat, your gut breaks it down into triglycerides and packages it up into chylomicrons, little bundles of energy that go straight into your bloodstream and out to your cells.
• Triglycerides from stored body fat. When you aren’t getting energy from food, your body turns to your fat stores. It processes them differently; they go to your liver, get broken down into triglycerides, and then get packaged up into LDL and sent into your blood for distribution.

If you aren’t eating many calories, your liver starts burning body fat for fuel, and sending it out packaged in LDL particles. That’s when your cholesterol goes up.

But if you’re eating lots of fat, your liver slows down LDL production. It kicks back and relaxes while the energy-rich chylomicrons from your gut go straight into your bloodstream and eventually to your cells. That’s when your cholesterol goes down.

So if you want to lower your cholesterol numbers fast, eat lots of fat. You’ll be getting most of your energy from chylomicrons instead of LDL.

More From Bulletproof

Everything You Know About Cholesterol Is Wrong

Is Saturated Fat Bad for You? Here’s What You Need to Know

Is Fat Good for You? Everything You Need to Know About Dietary Fats

Health Benefits of Grass-Fed Butter — Why It’s Good for You

How to do the cholesterol drop protocol

Controlling your cholesterol has a lot of valuable uses. For example:

• You could eat extra fat for a few days, drop your cholesterol, get a blood test, and show it to your health/life insurance company so they adjust your rates down. Is this ethical? Maybe.
• You can wait until your doctor congratulates you on your lower cholesterol, then reveal that you decreased it by eating as much fat as you possibly could. If you do this, tell me about your doctor’s reaction on the Bulletproof Facebook page. It will probably be worth sharing.
• You can do this protocol just for personal validation that the mainstream stance on cholesterol is wrong, or at least incomplete.

Your 7-day cholesterol lowering protocol

1. Eat less. Eat significantly fewer calories than you normally would (staying low-carb, high-fat) for 3 days.
2. Get blood test #1. Get a cholesterol test on the morning of day 4. Be sure you have nothing but water for 12 hours before your test. You always want to be fasted before blood tests; eating food in that window can influence the results.
3. Eat a lot of fat. Starting right after your day 3 cholesterol test, eat as much fat as you can for days 4, 5, and 6. Still keep carbs low, but add fat to everything. Some people go as high as 4,000 – 5,000 calories a day.
4. Get blood test #2. Get your second and final cholesterol test on the morning of day 7. Again, make sure you fast for 12 hours before the test.

According to the results almost everyone has seen so far, your cholesterol should be higher when you eat less fat, and much lower when you eat as much fat as you possibly can.

One note: Apparently Brain Octane Oil and coffee can both mess with your results, so take a break from Bulletproof Coffee during the protocol. Don’t worry; your morning cup will feel all the more powerful when you start again.

Whatever your cholesterol test results, be sure you keep the data and send it to Dave Feldman. He’s always collecting and compiling results from people, and he says on his site that he hopes to use them to get a clinical study funded soon. That would be huge.

If you want to learn more about healthy cholesterol levels, check out this article on why everything you know about cholesterol is wrong.

To dig deeper into the cholesterol drop protocol, take a look at Dave Feldman’s site, Cholesterol Code. He has great articles on how cholesterol works that are worth your time to read. Thanks for reading, and a big thanks to Feldman for his cutting-edge biohacking!