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Cholesterol
My LDL (bad) cholesterol is too high to measure. I asked how high could be reliably measured but didn't get an answer. My total cholesterol is 433. This appears to be dietary, and I have improved my diet. My doctor asked me if I munched down a stick of butter on my way in this time. For some perspective on that 433 mg/dL total cholesterol:
less than 200: good
200 to 239: borderline high
240 or above: high
He recommended omega 3 butter, oatmeal, hummus, tabouli, almonds, and salmon.
Daily dietary guidelines I beat out of him:
My typical diet recently has been (only) six cands of Kirkland diet shakes, which works out to the values in the third column.
1g of fat = 9 calories.
less than 200: good
200 to 239: borderline high
240 or above: high
He recommended omega 3 butter, oatmeal, hummus, tabouli, almonds, and salmon.
Daily dietary guidelines I beat out of him:
| At Risk | Not At Risk | Me, Yesterday | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Max Dietary Cholesterol | 200mg | 300mg | 0.0mg |
| % of calories from fat | 7-10% | 20-35% | 8.7% |
| Max % calories from saturated fat | 7% | 10% | 2.0% |
My typical diet recently has been (only) six cands of Kirkland diet shakes, which works out to the values in the third column.
1g of fat = 9 calories.
no subject
That's kind of alarming.
Did he recommend one of the cholesterol lowering drugs?
Does exercise play a significant, or only helping role?
no subject
Yes.
He hasn't tried to get me to exercise.
no subject
A year ago all my cholesterol numbers were in the extreme high range. Now thanks to a better diet and Simvastatin my cholesterol levels dropped 50% down to normal or better levels. So these are fixable things. I hope you have as good luck with them as I.
no subject
no subject
If your values are that high while consuming only diet shakes, I suspect exercise won't help significantly. I'd strongly suggest getting on lipitor or one of the other cholesterol lowering drugs.
no subject
Aerobic exercise can raise HDLs, it does not affect LDLs, and if it affects triglycerides, it's a small effect, and unproven. Anaerobic exercise doesn't do nearly as much, but it does help.
You might want to ask your doctor just how much experience he has with very high cholesterol issues, as his recommendations seem kind of odd to me. It sounds like he told you to do more of what would help someone with an overall cholesterol level around 250. He might as well have prescribed niacin & vitamin C. You need a fairly large change, and omega3s only do so much.
If you are subsisting on Kirkland diet shakes then something else is wrong. It might be genetic, Kirkland might be lying in their nutritional info, you might be missing out on some weird specific micronutrient that controls LDL production...
I would get a second test to make sure the first one wasn't just wrong (it happens) or someone else's (it also happens). Then I'd try changing my diet to include more foods (but still low fat) and get more aerobic exercise (are you still running?) and get retested in 3 or 4 months. If that doesn't do it, I'd go for a statin.
There's a couple of hybrid drugs out now that use lower doses of a statin with a cholesterol absorption blocker. Since the likelihood of side effects for both drugs seems to go up with the square of the dosage, using 2 synergistic low dosages seems to be a good thing. Vytorin (ezetimibe/simvastatin) is what I'm on now, and it's keeping me at 2xx (from an unmedicated 5xx).
I'm not a doctor, but I do have 30 years of experience with high cholesterol and treatments thereof. I've changed doctors in the past due to them not knowing as much as I do about this one issue.
Last, it looks to me like your table has "At Risk" and "Not At Risk" swapped.
no subject
Under those circumstances, the doctor does the best he can.
no subject
Significantly less than a month, in fact.
I'm dubious about the diet-LDL thing