Do High Fat Diets Boost Testosterone? (What My Blood Test Says)

Описание: One of the things we hear about aging is how testosterone levels drop as we get older. For men who want to hang on to their youthful vitality as long as they can—and I’m thinking into our 80s and 90s—maintaining healthy testosterone levels is something we’re going to want.

So when this meta-analysis came out comparing low fat diets to high fat diets I knew right away that I wanted to try it and see if I could replicate the result.

In the paper’s introduction, they talk about the decline in men’s testosterone levels of about 1% since the 1970s, and this is for all men of any age.

Part of this is attributed to the rising average BMI in men over the years. One of the things that has the biggest effect on your testosterone levels is how much body fat you’re carrying. I’ve seen this in myself, although it's the opposite of most. When I get really lean and shredded, my testosterone goes down, and my SHBG goes up. We’ll talk more about SHBG later, as it plays a major role in how much useable testosterone you have.

The researchers felt there was more at play than just increasing body fat percentages and hypothesized that the decrease in the amount of fat men consume these days might be a factor. A trend that started in the 1960s and has resulted in a 10% decline in the amount of fat we eat.

So they looked at 6 studies that compared low-fat diets to high-fat diets, with the average of the low-fat diets being just under 20 percent and the high-fat diets being just under 40 percent. My macro split before trying a high-fat diet was about 30 percent fat, 30 percent protein, and 40 percent carbs.

I then increased my fat intake to 40 percent for a month before getting blood work done.

What the researchers found was low-fat diets had a small to moderate decrease in total and free testosterone and DHT compared to high-fat diets.

The one thing that didn’t change much was SHBG, or sex hormone binding globulin, which binds to testosterone, making it essentially useless.

So, when trying a high-fat diet, you’d expect testosterone production to increase without a significant change in SHBG; This is NOT the result I saw in my bloodwork when I tried the diet.

I wanted to be really lean when I did this test because getting shredded tanks my testosterone, and SHBG goes up. So, I figured it would put me in a good state to see if increasing fats would increase T levels and, more importantly, free testosterone.

I’m comparing my results to an old test I did 3 years ago. So, I brought my weight within a pound and a half of what I weighed when I did that test; this was important because I wanted to be at a similar body fat percentage.

When I got my bloodwork done after eating a high-fat diet for a month, it turned out that my free T is slightly higher now. Unlike the findings in the meta-analysis, my SHBG dropped significantly. It was still high, but it went from 98 nmol/L to 81 nmol/L, and this is what improved my free testosterone, as my total testosterone levels actually dropped from my previous test.

Something I should mention that they found in the analysis was that cholesterol levels increased along with the high-fat diet. In my case, I actually had high total cholesterol for the first time in my life ever.

My LDL cholesterol, which is what they call bad cholesterol, wasn’t high, nor was my non-HDL cholesterol, but I had a very high HDL cholesterol, which is considered the good cholesterol. When you added it all together, it put me at .62 nmol/L over what’s considered the healthy range.

I tried to focus on healthy unsaturated fats using avocados, a fish oil supplement, peanut butter, and olive oil. I also made sure I was eating two servings of salmon a week and increased my egg consumption from 2 to 4 eggs a day.

The meta-analysis mentioned a study that found simply swapping out saturated fats for unsaturated fats increased the test subjects' total testosterone between 17.4 to 19.9 percent.

Because I was quite lean and had more muscle mass per pound of body weight, this could’ve affected my results and might be why they differed from what the meta-analysis found.

If you want to try this for yourself. The first thing you need to do is to start tracking everything you’re eating to see what percentage of fats you are currently consuming.

Then, you should get your blood work done before you make any changes to your diet.

I’d discourage anyone from trying this with higher fat levels than 40 percent. We want to keep our cholesterol levels within a healthy range, and we need to have a balanced diet, leaving enough room for protein and carbohydrates.

https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...

https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...