Nick NorwitzMD PhD, Oxford-Harvard | Metabolic Health Educator | “Stay Curious”

I Ate 600 Strips of Bacon 👀🥓 #bacon #eggs #cholesterol

15 Oct 2024 · 1 min

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1:00

In this monologue, the speaker recounts a 20‑day self‑experiment in which he consumed 600 strips of bacon, totaling roughly 21,000 kcal and 1.8 kg of bacon fat. For the first ten days his LDL cholesterol remained stable; during the second ten days he added carbohydrate calories in the form of honey, mirroring protocols from his earlier “egg‑experiment” and the “Oreo versus statin” trial. The added carbs caused a 22 % drop in LDL cholesterol. He uses this result to argue that the lipid‑energy model—a mechanistic framework that explains LDL rises in lean, insulin‑sensitive individuals on low‑carb diets—outperforms conventional explanations that focus on saturated fat, fiber, and static LDL concepts. The speaker positions the lipid‑energy model as repeatedly validated across his self‑experiments.

Chapters

I ate 600 strips of bacon over the past 20 days, and in total, 21,000 kilocalories from bacon and 1,800 grams from bacon and bacon fat alone. The first 10 days, my cholesterol was stable. Then, for the final 10 days, I did similar to what I did in the egg experiment, the egg-speriment, and the famous Oreo versus statin experiment. I added carbs. This time I added carbs in the form of honey, and it dropped my cholesterol. The added carbs dropped my LDL cholesterol by 22%. And this is the point: when we pit the lipid energy model, a mechanistic explanation for why LDL cholesterol increases when some people, especially lean insulin-sensitive people, go low carb— when we pit the lipid energy model against conventional ideas about LDL cholesterol, saturated fat, fiber, and so on, the lipid-energy model wins the day again and again.