Chapter 2 - Cholesterol, Facts and Fiction

dropped to just under 190 and her blood sugar to under 100! Cases like this are common.

Lets look at another, though hypothetical, scenario that happens all too often when people are concerned about cholesterol and diet and keeping their cholesterol under control. A man goes to the doctor who discovers from his blood tests that his total cholesterol level is at 240. (HDL 60 and LDL 180) The doctor, seeing that this level is undesirably high, recommends a specific type of diet and says that it’s guaranteed to get cholesterol down to 200 if he follows it to the letter. This patient is concerned and wants to do the right thing, so he follows the diet very closely and sure enough, when he re-tests his blood for cholesterol levels, the new reading is all the way down to 200. (HDL 45 and LDL 155) That’s certainly a much better total number, according to the general charts, but is it all good? Let’s look a little closer.

If this patient’s HDL was at 60 on his first test result, that would make the ratio 4 (total cholesterol [240] divided by HDL [60] = 4).That’s in the ideal range. On the second test, however, the HDL was 45. Even though the total cholesterol count was down, even to an ideal range for a total, the new ratio would have changed to 4.4 (200 total cholesterol divided by 45 HDL = 4.4). The new ratio is actually worse for this patient’s health and is leading him toward a more serious risk of heart attack! This isn’t good at all. The reason he went to the doctor was because he wanted to lower his cholesterol in the first place — to lower his health risks! So you can plainly see from this example that it’s not as simple as just randomly decreasing numbers like the doctors, insurance companies and pharmaceutical salesmen would like for us to believe! Ratios are actually a greater concern than total numbers. There are more bits of information about cholesterol and diet that seem to be myths as well.

An interesting study that was published in “the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism” shattered some widely held, current beliefs: There were two groups of people in this particular experiment. They fed one group a high fat, “low carbohydrate”

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