So as you can see above I've finally posted my blood tests before and after jaw surgery. As you might expect, the surgery resulted in severe swelling, no doubt with a concommitant rise in inflammatory markers and, as you can see, platelet count. (But mean platelet volume has been steadily decreasing throughout the year, which is inconsistent with this and baffles me.) Fortunately, the pain level was minimal, which was striking considering the invasiveness of the procedure. The last blood test was done a month after my last pain medication dose.
Suffice to say that my 1400 cal/d juice diet was unexpectedly cut short by the opportunity to do surgery sooner than expected. Unfortunately, because I had to gain weight for the surgery and then struggle to keep it on after the fact despite a liquid diet, I basically ended up consuming a full-calorie diet of Amy's organic soup for the entire month of December. But as I said above, I didn't want to waste the opportunity to experiment. So I ended up eating one full bar of Endangered Species 88% dark everyday (by melting it in my mouth), plus as much olive oil as I could stand (submerged veggie burgers, etc.), in an attempt to see if immitating Jean Calment in these specific regards could compensate for my otherwise crap diet. (Sorry, high sodium organic vegan soup that comes in a can, loaded with omega-6 oils and sugar, is not healthy.)
As you can see, my HDL skyrocketed, which is a good thing, and no doubt one major reason for Calment's longevity despite lightly smoking and drinking for a century. But perhaps more significantly, my HDL is now well above my LDL, whereas LDL had always been less before, despite consuming dark chocolate and olive oil on and off for years. I ascribe this result to literally drowning my food in the latter, to the extent I could stand to do so. On the minus side, homocysteine is now a disaster. And RDW is still at high normal after a yearlong ascent. Wiki says it's consistent with defficiency in folate, B12, and iron, which would be consistent with the high homocysteine and low-normal hemoglobin. (I've started folate and B12 supplemention. I'm trying to chelate naturally, so at the moment I'm content to accept low normal low hemoglobin and bilirubin.) In fairness to Amy's, I can't necessarily blame it on the soup because I developed an antibiotic-resistant throat infection which persisted basically throughout the entire month. It survived amoxycillin, and only died after 10 full days of keflex, shortly prior to the last test. So perhaps that's what the inflammation means. My CRP, although half of its previous level, is still not back to zero, although it's well within the normal range.
But the most ominous outcome is my steady rise in fasting glucose. 86 is considered normal, but considering how hard I've worked to maintain a healthy diet prior to December, it should be considerably lower, say 70, at this point. While I'm tempted to say that calorie-restricted juice diets are just a bunch of BS that raise your blood sugar, I can't go there on account of the full-calorie soup diet. Indeed, my HbA1c didn't budge much, so perhaps this was just a bad day. Still, it demands more careful attention. Perhaps the HbA1c is low because of all the antioxidants in my diet, but insulin resistance is happening anyway due to persistently high dietary sugar intake.
One surprising result is that my eGFR (kidney filtration rate) actually went up. This is in stark contrast to my keto diet, which resulted in its rapid decline that I was lucky enough to reverse. Perhaps keto merely clogs the kidneys in a reversible way, as I've read research indicating that it's actually good for kidney disease patients despite the considerable kidney utilization in such a regimen; indeed, the reversal from 86 to my normal 102 was astounding to me. In any event, this juice diet must have reversed some much more persistent damage, pushing me from 102 to 106, so there's one vote in favor of such a regimen. I don't think it's noise in the measurement because the juice diet seemed to normalize the specific gravity of my urine. It was bright (basically neon) yellow, instead of its usual clear color, starting a while into the juice diet and ending only after a few weeks of soup. This would be consistent with excellent kidney function. If the color is any clue, then perhaps it actually peaked above 106. Or maybe the color is irrelevant. BUN is also quite low, reflecting my attempt to restrict protein intake in order to upregulate protein recovery via senile plaque disaggregation and autophagy. No doubt the kidneys are pleased.
Vitamin D3 is way up as you can see. Considering that all-cause mortality bottoms out around 35, a score of 51 is not necessarily good and is a result of excessive supplementation. (I have a theory that elevated D3 causes arterial plaque calcification and thus increased morbidity in the context of Western diet, thereby masking the putative benefits against Alzheimer's and cancer of higher levels. So I'm not sure which way I want to push it.)
So what to do? I've just a few days ago returned what I think is my favorite diet, that being intermittant fasting. Based on the notion that most of the benefits accrue with only modest reductions in caloric intake, I've decided to set my intake at 1500 per day (which means 3000 on alternating days), excluding whatever few calories happen to be in my supplement pills. So this is 100 higher than on the juice diet. While I'm not going to any great lengths to eat ketogenic foods, I am trying to keep the total intake of sugar and refined carbs in check. (I don't really care all that much for health reasons, as even at 1500 per day, caloric restriction largely overrides such hazards. It's more that I just don't fancy such foods, and I feel that my current fasting glucose and homocysteine deserve a concerted effort to reduce.) Still, I'm reminded of the Kame study and its impressive antidementia results associated with at least 3 juice servings per week. So I don't plan to eliminate them from my diet.
