What happens a few hours after eating a high-fat meal?
We are only as old as our veins. What can we do to maintain vascular function as we age? Unhealthy diet and sedentary behavior can lead to bad aging processes, such as damage to the micro-energy plants in our cells, which can cause the formation of free radicals, oxidative stress, and inflammation, which leads to arterial dysfunction that can end in cardiovascular disease.
In a series of videos I did about ten years ago, I discussed a landmark study showing that a high-fat diet can impair arterial function within hours of use, compared to no change with a low-fat diet, as you can see below and at 1:04 in my video. Saturated Fats Cause Artery and Lung Inflammation.
In the study, high-fat foods that significantly impaired artery function included McDonald’s Sausage and Egg McMuffins. How do we know if the sausage, egg, or cheese was to blame? How about crappy carbohydrates in biscuits or something else? Because the low-fat food that didn’t affect artery function was the carby sugar Frosted Flakes.
As soon as your nerve function starts to recover, after five or six hours—it’s time for lunch! Then, your arteries may be hit by another load of meat, eggs, milk, or fat. Why is what happens to your body after eating so important? Because most of us spend about 16 hours a day in that post-meal state, it’s constantly pounding our veins. No wonder heart disease is our number one killer.
And it not only burns the arteries of the heart but also the lungs. “High fat challenge increases airway inflammation and impairs bronchodilator recovery in asthma.” When people with asthma cough up sputum into their lungs four hours after the same type of high-fat meal, inflammatory cells fire up in the high-fat meal group, as you can see below and at 2:12 in mine. video.
In terms of lung function, when they are given two hits of their inhalers (containing a drug called albuterol or Ventolin), their airways open as they should after eating a low-fat diet. But after a high-fat meal, the same inhaler doses don’t work anymore, they go out after a few hours because of all the extra inflammation in their lungs, as you can see below and at 2:29 in mine. video.
What you eat can determine how well you breathe.
But those study participants were people with asthma. However, the researchers found that even people without asthma had the same spike in inflammatory cells in the sputum they coughed up into their lungs four hours after eating what, in this case, was Jimmy Dean’s Meat Lover’s breakfast dish.
And not just more inflammatory cells; there is a doubling of the amount of pro-inflammatory oxidized LDL cholesterol that is absorbed by the type of white blood cells that go on to form foam cells. Those are the cells that form the inflamed pus in your artery wall that leads to a heart attack. All of this happened within hours of eating pizza, this time. The fat in your blood goes up, and so do the endotoxin levels, as you can see below and at 3:16 in mine. video.
Endotoxins are components of bacterial cell walls, and foods such as meat can be so contaminated with bacteria—both live and dead—that they accumulate endotoxins. We are talking about red and white meat, as you can see below and at 3:28 in my video.
But a recent study (published in 2020) suggests that the main victim may not be endotoxins after all, but the fat itself. Saturated fats that float into your bloodstream after an unhealthy diet may directly cause inflammation. Either way, we are responsible for what we eat, food by food, in shaping the risk factors for chronic metabolic disease.
Doctor’s Note
This article is the first in a three-part series on saturated fat and fast food. The next two Exercise to Protect Your Arteries from Fast Food again Foods That Can Help Protect Your Arteries From Saturated Fat.
What about the “butter is back” lessons? See related posts below.
