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Former Mayo social media guru takes on the company dietary message – Grand Forks Herald

Dec 20th, 2021

ROCHESTER Lee Aase cuts into a midafternoon filet, 6 ounces, medium-rare, hold the potatoes please and skip the bread while you're at it.

Offered a side of fresh fruit, he learned it was an insulin-spiking mix of melon, pineapple and grapes, so he asked for broccolini and asparagus instead.

It's 2 p.m. on a late fall afternoon, and for the former face of Mayo Clinic's social media brain trust, this lone cut of beef with a side of stalks is the first meal of the day. And he's barely even hungry.

Before converting to a low-carb, high-fat diet five years ago, Aase, who was 58 when he retired last summer after 21 years at Mayo, watched his calories, avoided saturated fat and followed all the other standard guardrails for a "healthy" diet.

He also weighed 65 pounds more than he does today.

Aase's adoption of the keto way began under pressure back in 2016. With two weddings on the horizon, he was unhappy about how he would look while walking his daughters down the aisle.

"I was about 265 pounds then," he says. "I'm 6 foot 6. That's a BMI of 30.1, just barely into the obese category. But I rationalized that I was spreading it over a big frame ... Anyway, I had plenty of tummy."

Determined to lose the weight, at first he tried the obvious: exercise.

"I was working out all summer, six days a week, 30 minutes a day on the elliptical machine at the Y," he remembers. "Maybe I got down to 260? I was 53 years old at the time, and I remember getting off the machine and just saying, 'is this the way it's going to be? Am I going to just decline and get sicker and fatter?'"

It wasn't easy to know what to cut out, as his meal plan was already devoid of obviously fattening foods.

"My typical breakfast would be a bowl of Corn Chex for breakfast, because that's healthy whole grains," he says with a wry bob of his head. He paired it with another staple of a so-called healthy diet.

"I'd get a quart of orange juice at Kwik Trip on the way into work, because that's vitamin C," he says. "I didn't realize fruit juice has as much sugar as Coca-Cola."

Looking back, he sees his diet as an energy-sapping roller coaster marked by carbohydrates, followed by hunger, set on repeat.

"The corn turns into sugar the minute it hits your stomach ... My blood sugar would crash around 10:30 or 11 o'clock in the morning, so I'd go out and grab a chicken salad for lunch. Then I'd have whatever we were having for supper and a bowl of popcorn at night ... Because that's filling and healthy whole grains and all that sort of stuff."

Aase never had a sweet tooth while packing on the pounds, but he was partial to chips.

"The thing for those is, you can always eat more. If you were to put a two pound steak out here, I would have difficulty eating it, but you could hand me a big bag of chips with salsa," and he'd never get full.

Today the father of six weighs the same as he weighed in high school 205 and, with a 32-inch waist, is two sizes below the 34-inch jeans he wore in high school.

He dropped the weight over a two-year period by first reducing, then largely eliminating carbohydrates from his diet while increasing the fat content via butter, meat, cheese and nuts.

Aase says his weight loss kicked into high gear after adding intermittent fasting: 10 weeks of skipping breakfast and lunch every other day while eating keto meals and drinking coffee with heavy cream in the morning.

"I will often have breakfast for lunch," he says of his new normal, a meal that can include "four eggs, bacon, and sometimes two grilled steaks, saving one for leftovers. I typically have my first meal of the day when I come back from golf, around 2 o'clock."

Aase made the changes after reading works by physicians and physiologists, authors such as Jason Fung ("The Obesity Code") and David Unwin, and science journalists such as Nina Teicholz ("The Big Fat Surprise") and Gary Taubes ("The Case Against Sugar").

The diet is often depicted as not sustainable. Aase weighs himself each day on a scale that connects to an app on his phone , one showing his fluctuations over the past several years. It also shows he's been holding steady around 205 for a year and a half now.

Though the diet is considered unhealthy by the Mediterranean Diet-promoting standards of his former employers at Mayo, Aase says his cardiovascular markers say the opposite.

A recent trip to the doctor revealed he had optimal HDL or "good" cholesterol (75, when the goal is to be over 40), and blood triglycerides (45, when the goal is to remain below 150).

As is often the case in those who eat keto, Aase learned he had very high LDL, or so-called bad cholesterol, however, and it triggered a referral for statins.

Instead, he asked for a test using CT imaging of the heart. When that score came back perfect, his doctor told him he could skip the statins. A different test showed his elevated bad cholesterol reflected a predominantly large, buoyant type, one believed harmless.

He recently flew to Los Angeles to take part in a study measuring change in coronary CT angiography over time among those eating keto. It hopes to resolve the question of whether low triglycerides and high HDL effectively cancel out the dangers of LDL

Armed with an MBA in health care management, Aase now prepares to launch a first-of-its-kind clinic and health coaching venture in Austin called HELPCareHealth, short for Health, Energy and Longevity Plan (www.HELPCare.health). He will be partnering in the venture with Dr. David Strobel, a primary care physician of 30 years.

Using a cash-only membership model, HELP Care plans to incorporate low carbohydrate, high fat (LCHF) dietary lifestyle coaching into medical care offered to people struggling with the standard dietary paradigm.

Asked how the clinicians within his former professional home maintain their faith in a dietary paradigm that has witnessed only worsening results in the general public, Aase grows reflective.

"I think mainly they believe nobody's listening to them," he says. "I think they probably believe that if the patients would just do what we tell them to do, then that would be it."

"When you've been saying it's calories in, calories out, saturated fat and LDL cholesterol, and your whole career has been built on that message, it's going to be hard to change your thinking. The thing is, they weren't saying anything about my weight when I was 260."

"I wish there was more openness to the alternative hypothesis," he counters, "more study and more curiosity about this. But my perspective is, I'm just going to work on an initiative that will give people the information they need to make changes in their life."

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Former Mayo social media guru takes on the company dietary message - Grand Forks Herald

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