Cholesterol curiosities page

[naiadknight]

I ate a minute amount of food an hour before test (1/16 slice of cheese and a chunk of sundried tomato.) It was a sample at the market and I didn't even think about it. My LDL is odd. How much of a difference would that minute amount of food made?
Total: 246 mg/ dl
HDL: 74 mg/ dl
trig: 60 mg/ dl
LDL (Freidwald) 160 mg/ dl
LDL: (Iranian): 56?! mg/ dl

Could the food have done that much?! Did I miscalculate? My ratios look nearly ideal: Total/ LDL= 3.2, trig/ HDL= 0.81, LDL/ HDL (Iranian)= 0.23?!, LDL/ HDL (Friedwald)= 2.16

I'm just thoroughly confused by the LDL coming out so radically different.

[Stabby]

Nice HDL, that's what really seems to matter. LDL is a tricky one. Could be that you're just controlling inflammation well and you have decreased need for it. I have pretty low LDL but high HDL and I put butter, tallow, and coconut on everything. There is definitely more to it than meets the eye. But HDL is seemingly very important, as are some of the smaller subfractions of LDL which you may or may not have.

[naiadknight]

Yeah, I'm really happy about the HDL. Just wondering if my results were affected by that teensy bit of food.

[naiadknight]

Did some research. Apparently, eating can mess with your trigs, which is why they have you fast. My question is still whether than minute amount of food actually had that effect or not. I want to know if my levels are actually that good, or if it's a false positive.

[Stabby]

Eating can affect trigs since when we eat a lot of carbs some of them get immediately packaged as trigs to be stored as fat. I'm not so sure that HDL or LDL can be drastically influenced by a bit of cheese and tomato, but I can't say for sure.

I wish Grokologist was a magic science genie. Then we could have definitive answers 24/7 . Anyone else know?

[Staffie]

Check your Iranian formula. I calculated it to be 133.1 = 206.7 + 31.6 - 67.2 - 38 I have no idea if your inadvertent snack would have skewed the results.

[cillakat]

It's not odd really, it's b/c your trigs are so low. If the food affected triglycerides in this case, they'd be higher. So it's unlikely the food had an effect.

[naiadknight]

whups, missed the 1. New ratios: total/ HDL: 3.32, trig/ hdl: 0.81, ldl/ hdl: 1.8
All still good, but the numbers make more sense now.

[naiadknight]

Cilla, I got to thinking about it and realized that less than a gram of any of the macros and less than 10 calories could NOT have made any impact worth mentioning. I think I'll take my happy numbers and wander off now.