What is your Cholesterol Level?

acogg

Perfect. My doctor told me that I border on Olympian athlete level. Hah! I am healthier than my holistic doctor!

HollisGrant

On top of that, the link between high cholesterol and heart disease is tenuous at best. What is really an issue is how dense your LDL cholesterol is. And, while it's simple to test this, hardly anyone does because the medical establishment is so obsessed with lowering overall cholesterol.

Some info on what good levels are from the Mayo Clinic:

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cholesterol-levels/CL00001

My personal experience is that when my overall cholesterol is low, my HDL is also low. I have been able to raise my HDL number into the good range while dropping my triglyceride and LDL number into the optimal range. But my overall cholesterol number went up slightly. So, if all you knew was that, you'd say that mine got worse when it actually got better.

As part of the "medical establishment" I need to protest this one. I'm a Nurse Practitioner in a Women's Heart Clinic and I spend my day treating women with and at risk for heart disease. At my clinic (with 150 cardiologists), we are not focused on the total cholesterol. In fact, I spend a great deal of time explaining to women how the other numbers are more important than the total cholesterol. And in fact, we also will take this farther and look at particle number and size.

The connection between LDL cholesterol and heart disease is quite substantial. Both the AHA and the ACC (American College of Cardiologists) have stated this in their official guidelines. http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/guidelines/cholesterol/atp3xsum.pdf. These are guidelines that are based on well qualified studies and are taken very seriously. There are other lesser studies out there with contrived data for the general population that state things differently.

As far as your cholesterol numbers, your triglycerides are driven by processed foods, fried foods, sweets, high fat foods and lack of exercise. Genetics can play a roll as well. The triglyserides are not part of your total cholesterol number. Your LDL ( I refer to this as the lousy cholesterol) is driven by lack of exercise, general diet, and genetics. This is part of your total cholesterol number. The other part of the total cholesterol is the HDL ( I refer to this as the happy cholesterol). This one is cardioprotective. In men, we want this number to be over 40, in women, over 50. Exercise is the only thing that will drive this higher. If you smoke it will bring your HDL lower. So, the HDL and LDL added together make your total cholesterol. If your HDL is 88 and your LDL is 115, your total cholesterol is 203. This is overall a nice combination for a young, healthy person with no heart disease or other heart risks. For that same 203, the HDL could be 31, with an LDL of 172. This is a whole new story!! I would give you three months of hard work to see what you could do to improve the situation, then we would need to discuss medications if things didn't get better.

I promise you, I don't like putting people on medications. The first step in the guidelines is lifestyle modifications- this is diet and exercise. Patients need to take this the same as a medication prescription. It is that important! Lately there have been quite a few posts casting doubts on medical professionals and the treatment of cholesterol. I'm really not sure why or what the nidus of this is, but this is one of the most important factors in heart health.

I would love to work my way right out of a job. And the people here on MFP are making all the right changes to do that.

Thanks for posting this explanation!

J72FIT

Total: 225
HDL: 82
LDL: 134
Trigs: 45
Total/HDL ratio: 2.7

DisneyLuvnGal

Cholesterol 156
Triglycerides Direct 78
Total HDL Cholesterol Direct 64.0
Direct LDL 75.71
Cholesterol/HDL Ratio 2

copy and pasted from my results on 1/4/14

I tried for years working my butt off to get my HDL up, nothing helped.
Then it went from 25 to 60 in 3 months after I had a kidney transplant, lol.