MissB,

Cutting out the carbs will result in much lower triglycerides and the associated total cholesterol level. If you were low carbing when the blood was taken, then you had not fasted (which results in natural high triglycerides). Your HDL level is good and is heart protective.

That's interesting, I am currently trying to help my mother get her blood pressure down...perhaps Potassium would help...

THANKS!

I'm 18 years old, female, and you wouldn't know it by looking at my lipid profile, but my family has a high triglyceride issue:

Lipid profile(02/21/2006):
CHOLESTEROL: 151
TRIGLYCERIDE: 89
HDL: 45
LDL: 88

Lipid profile(03/10/2006):
CHOLESTEROL: 146
TRIGLYCERIDE: 100
HDL: 49
LDL: 85
VLDL: 20

This is my latest lipid profile(08/10/2006):

CHOLESTEROL: 265
TRIGLYCERIDE: 31
HDL: 84
LDL: 191
VLDL: 6

I'm pretty happy for the results. My total cholesterol is high, but I'm not worried at all.

Capo,
Why should you be worried? You are 18 years old female!!!!!!!You have plenty of estrogen to keep your artheries smooth and flexible, so if there is any cholesterol plaque, they will expend to accomodate it. Your high level of estrogen is indeed protective of heart desease at this age, but the picture is different for menopausal and post-menop women who lost their estrogen-protective quality. The artheries no longer are smooth and flexible, and no longer they expand to let blood flow freely. Existing plaque starts to harden and artheries start to constrict in response to estrogen drop. Here is when high LDL may become a problem. BTW, TGR <150 is normal, only 1/5 of TGR are part of the cholesterol calculation. LDL is hard to keep low on high fat diet. LDL around 200 may be fine for you, but I won't be happy with high LDL at my age.
ETA: I have calaculated your total to HDL ratio for all 3 lab results, which I rounded to one SF:
1) 3.3
2) 3.0
3) 3.2
AS you can see the ratio is the same, actually your previous test shows a little lower CHo/HDL ratio that your last one.
PPl get ecstatic when their HDL goes up on LC diet, but they forget that both HDL and LDL rise proportionally and in many cases, LDL raises disproportionally while HDL is not much so.
I see same trend with my CHO, the more sat.fat I eat, the higher is LDL and total and HDL raises 10-15 % too, but not enough to give me better ratio. It does have a lot to do with my age and dropping estrogen indeed but in general older folks IMO need to be carefull.
JMO

Wow, thanks dina1957 for all your input! I was under the impression that high cholesterol is good at any age and that total cholesterol or LDL cholesterol do not cause heart disease, atherosclerosis, or any other diseases for that matter.

You may or may not be familiar with Weston A. Price:
http://www.westonaprice.org/modernd...ts_cholest.html

I am very much familiar with WP. Initially, just like you, thoguht: wow, they are onto something, and started eating lots of sat.fat. just to gain weight and my LDL climbed. I even was a patient of the dr who is affiliated with WP and is on the board. He is very much "up to date" with his ideas and treatment plans but did not help me much with my health issues.
As for CHO, it is your choice, and enjoy it while you young. Hope you won't be dissapointed later in your life.
ETA: according to many studies, plaque formation starts in teen years, I have no time now, but you can read more about it, WP is not the only one foundation there the knowledge.
D.

Weston price foundation says:


Lower white blood count correlates significantly with lower risk of heart disease and lower all cause mortality, especially cancer. Why would he leave that out of the article

White Blood Cell Count and Risk for All-Cause, Cardiovascular, and Cancer Mortality in a Cohort of Koreans
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/c...62/11/1062?etoc

These findings indicate that the white blood cell count is an independent risk factor for all-cause mortality and for CVD mortality.


White blood cell levels are a good predictor of strokes, heart attacks, and fatal heart disease in older women, according to a nationwide study
http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/...whitecells.html

WBC Count and the Risk of Cancer Mortality in a National Sample of U.S. Adults: Results from the Second National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey Mortality Study
http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/cgi/content/full/13/6/1052

WBC remained significantly associated (P trend = 0.03) with total cancer mortality [highest versus lowest quartile (RR 1.66; 95% CI, 1.08-2.56)]. In stratified analyses, increased WBC was associated with higher risk of non-lung cancer (P trend = 0.04), but not lung cancer (P trend = 0.18). Among never smokers, a 1 SD increase in WBC (2.2 x 109 cells/L) was associated with greater risk of total (RR 1.32; 95% CI, 1.05-1.67) and non-lung (RR 1.30; 95% CI, 1.03-1.63) cancer mortality. These findings support the hypothesis that inflammation is an independent risk factor for cancer mortality. Additional studies are needed to determine whether circulating levels of inflammatory markers are associated with increased risk of incident cancer.

There are many many more showing the same thing.

DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH and don't believe the first thing you see just because its from weston price foundation.

WPf says:


This tells doesn't tell us that by eating lots of fat and cholesterol they will decrease their risk of dying. it only points to the progression of the disease. There are many diseases, including AIDS and Cancer where cholesterol will drop over time as the disease advances. it does not mean that by adding butter you will increase your cholesterol therefor reduce the risk of death.

WPF says:


BULL. The longest lived women in the world in okinawa have cholesterol of around 150mg/dl. Maybe he should rephrase the sentence like "people with falling cholesterol over time predicts greate rmortality due to an underyling illness which may be chronic for many years".

Just because there might be a weaker link between LDL and heart disease than say C-Reactive protein. It doesn't mean that LDL cholesterol readings cannot predict with a good degree of accuracy at which point Cardiac events are likely to occur. People are being very narrow minded. Heart disease is multi factoral, again, you want all *known* risk factors low.

Optimal total cholesterol is probably around 150mg/dl.

If the people of Masaii can eat tons of fat that doesn't mean 'you can' also. They eat their food, but still have a total cholesterol of around 120mg/dl. Hence why they got virually no heart disease.

Capo, for your age, 151mg/dl is where you should be at.

Low cholesterol numbers are highly correlated with mental impairment. There is nothing wrong with your cholestrol numbers, in fact, as a rough rule of thumb your numbers have 'improved' as your fasting triglycerides are rock bottom. Leave the desire for low cholesterol numbers to the fetishists. Read some well supported literature like 'The Great Cholesterol Con' by Anthony Colpo that clearly and effectively explains why basing your health on low cholesterol numbers is an error and in fact, unhealthy. It is full of great references that Whoa182 refuses to read and is unable to refute; look up his posts where he consistantly abandons threads when challenged to back up his poor ideas.

Kind regards

With low triglycerides, LDL doesn't seem to be a problem. Fortunately, except for the rare inexplainable oddball, fasting triglyerides are always low on low-carb.

Kind regards

Triglycerides are very easy to lower, and everything <150 is OK, no need to have it rock bottom. It takes a lot of refined sugar, fat and ... booze to raise TRG, but it does not take much sat. fat to raise LDL. LDL is hard to lower and lots of sat. fat raises LDL. So far I have read that high LDL is associated with CAD. But I am not a doctor, not sure if you are, you sound very affirmative on the issue. Regards.

Cholesterol is not causitive of heart disease, it is a WEAK predictor at best. Triglycerides are a better predictor, but again, they are not causitive. For those that buy into the cholestrol hypothesis (I find it extremely weak) low triglycerides indicate the fraction of LDL that has been identified as the most damaging (predictor?) will be very low, regardless of the total LDL level. My best guess is that most heart disease is related to wacked carb metabolism that is usually, but not always, indicated by high triglycerides and sometimes high cholesterol numbers. Wildly fluxuating blood sugars and high insulin is probably far more damaging to the body that anything from the cholesterol of any type.

I've never been very impressed by argument by authority, I gots a brain and like to use it. I have taken a few higher level undergraduate and graduate physiology classes and the pre-meds never did very well. They complained a lot for as a rule, they didn't seem to understand process well; they could memorize several hundred pages of anatomy in a week, but ask them to explain a simple graph... A MD is basically a mechanic for the human body, and like some mechanics, many aren't very good at diagnosis. I guess what I am taking a lot of words to say, I have much higher standards than the average MD.

Kind regards

I tend to agree since high levels of insulin tend to drive eicosanoid and prostaglandin production in the direction of inflammation.

So pre-med students failed physiology or they did not seem to undertsnad it? How they managed to get undergraduate degree then I belive it includes more than just memorizing anatomy.
In my home country, my pre-med students peers also took physics, calculus, phys. and oranic chem. and all of this requires understanding graphs and functions, I believe. We just took physics, calculus,a nd phys. chem.
MD is not a mechanic, since human body is not a mechanism, where each part can be isolated and fixed separately. BTW, if a mechanic can't find a problem, he is not a mechanic at all. I work with diffrent type of equipment and we never failed to find a problem and troubleshoot it.
Human body is not a mechanism, it is a biochemical system that involved hundreds of hormones. Just endocrine system alone consists of many glands, not only pancrease, and these glands works synergetically and define the rest of the functions. Unfortunately, many choose to ignore this fact, and simply fixated on one hormone, insulin.
This system is too complex and poorly understood, and each part (organ) can't be troubleshooted and fixed JUST BY ISOLATION. Unfortunately, this approach is used in western medicine and many problems arise because of it. No singe medication exist that treats one problem without creating a dozen of others but this is the best drs can do so far.
As for cholesterol in heart desease connection, it is not completely missunderstood. Those who have choosen to ignore high CHO, take their own chance. Insulin and Bgs fluctuations are of course, damaging, but again, does not explain heart desease and atherosclerosis progression, high blood pressure, and other causes of heart atack and stroke in individuals with normal blood sugar and insulin, and follow up death from MI and stroke.
Low TRG is just a matter of dietary changes, they fluctuate a lot, and not really damamaging. They can spike after one meal and drop sharply, even if you overdone alcohol night before. High LDL is something that is problematic in terms of lowering, many despite proper diet and exercise, normal BGs, still have high LDL. Add to the picture other risk factors: family history of heart desease, any inflamatory reponse to autoimmune deseases (psoriasis, lupus, etc.) and any systemic inflamation in general - and here you have, perfect reason for LDL to be problematic.
It is the same narrow view that got us in troubles with low fat madness. Before it was all about fat, now it is all about sugar, insulin, and carbs. Let's wait another couple decades, and we may find something esle...
As for drs, I still find it facinating with their knowlege, my brain work very well with graphs, mathematical equations, and everything can be logcially derived and calculated. But I would never be able to perform any surgery, even minor, although I know how to give injections, but i am still facinated with drs who save lives and perform miracles on daily basis. The more I read on human biology and biochemistry, the more I realize how hard it is to practice medicine. IMO, mathematically speaking, human body has too many variables to be desribed by few equations and graphs, as mechanism systems and equipment, and does not fit into laws of physics and themodynamics for the most part of it.
So I would rather be on a safe side, keeping my eye on both: CHO and BGs, until it is all clarified.
Best wishes,
D.

Just personal experience with many pre-med. I guess it's possible I've just run into all the 'slow' students, but with the 60+ I've had class with, it was the rule, with a few notable exceptions.



I think they require the same thing here in America, but maybe we are just dumber here. Maybe Americans can start going to medical and graduate school internationally? It would sure open up some spots for all of the international students here.



You have a really negative view of what a 'mechanism' is; it's not clear to me that 'mechanism' means that you dont consider the inter-relationship of parts. I imagine most mechanical engineers would disagree.



I don't think referring to doctors as 'mechanics' and implying that the body is a 'mechanism' is limiting at all, but feel free to set fire to the straw man. FYI, my point was that many car mechanics have superiour skills of diagnosis than doctors, and that more-or-less the mechanisms/systems they work on are both complicated. It's ok that you don't agree with me, but you need not create some innacurate model of my beliefs. Just ask.



I think it is pretty clear that the connection between cholesterol and heart disease is poor. I can back up my assertions, can you? (FYI, I won't be moved by a statement of 'doctors say...')



Ok, suppose that is true, what ya got for me?



But it is not clear that high LDL is really a problem. Data suggests that LDL with low triglycerides is not a problem. It is NOT LDL that is a problem. Or do you have data to suggest otherwise? (And to be clear, we aren't looking for a mere correlation, as suggested in the data, high LDL with concurrent low triglyceride is not a problem.)



That suggests that it is NOT LDL that is problematic.



From my side of the fence, it looks like you have a narrow focus on LDL.



Miracles? '..does not fit into laws of physics and thermodymanics'? Well, write up a paper and win the Nobel, seriously. For myself, I don't identify medical doctors as 'miracle workers', in fact from personal experience find that many really aren't all that smart. I'm not the smartest guy, but I'm not the dumbest. Some of the current thinking coming from the 'medical establishment' is comically wrong. Well, it would be comic if it didn't have such dire effects on people's lives.

Kind regards

I have to clarify: when we troubleshoot mechanical system or equipment, we need to isolate one part (or mechanism) at a time to find broken part of failed mechanism, this I beleive all mechanical engineers will agree. I am talking about system that failed to perform. Once the problem is located and broken part or failed mechanism is replaced or fixed, all the parts are put back together to function as integrated system. Unfortuntely, it is not exactly that simple with human body, and problem with western medicine - try to apply principles of mechanical engineering to human body that is not a biomechanical machine but biological system, and is not controlled by a one or two feedback loops, but by hundreds, and all organs interconnected. It can't be broken down into simple parts (although drs use this approach too), and fixing one part mechnically (by-pass surgery) may create hundreds of negative "echos" throught the entire body. same problem is seen in drugs: by treating symptoms of one desease, they create few other.
JMO

... but the opposite is not clear either.


nothing is clear and linear when it comes to CHO and heart desease. it is multifactoral and age does makes difference. What is great for 18 yo, may be detremental for 60 yo.

I don't focus on anything, I see CAD is a combination of factors, not just LDL as a single cause per se, but given other facrtor that we all agree do play role +high LDL indeed can trigger cardiac event. So I think it is prudent to keep LDL at certain level, but this is JMO. From my side of the fence, it looks like you are fixated on low TRG, which (unless they are really high) have no place in the equation, and choose to ignore LDL all together.
Thanks for the kind words anyway, I got carried away, should not have gotten into this discussion to begin with.