Before
you decide what to do about your cholesterol, you need to know how much
cholesterol you actually have. So get up, march over to your doctor’s office,
and hold out your arm so your doctor can stick a hollow needle into the vein in
the crook of your elbow and draw about 20 milliliters (ml) of bright, red
blood. Then when you go home, the little glass tube holding your blood goes off
to a medical laboratory where a technician counts the cholesterol particles. The
results you get back look like this: 225 mg/dL. Translation: You have 225
milligrams of total cholesterol in every decilitre (1⁄10 liter) of blood.
But
these numbers don’t paint the whole picture. The figures for your low density lipoproteins
(VLDLs, IDLs, LDLs) and high-density lipoproteins (HDLs) are still missing. Lipoproteins
are fat-and-protein particles that carry cholesterol into your arteries (LDLs)
or out of your body (HDLs), which is why HDLs are “good” and some of the LDLs
are “bad.”
The
problem with simple finger-stick tests such as those found in cholesterol home-testing
kits is that they only measure total cholesterol levels — no HDLs and no LDLs.
An incomplete result (total cholesterol alone) can scare you to death if it
shows you have high total cholesterol without letting you know that you — lucky
girl! lucky boy! — also have high HDLs. The fingerstick test can also provide
false reassurance if it shows a low total cholesterol level without letting you
know that your LDLs are also very low.
Now
that you know all this and have an accurate, complete doctor’s report in hand,
what do the results say about you? How can you tell if the numbers are high,
low, or in-between?
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