"The cholesterol number is essentially worthless," says Dr. Arthur Agatston. The Miami cardiologist and South Beach diet books author says the cholesterol of people who have heart attacks and those who don't are almost identical.
"The overlap is troubling," Dr. Kwame Akosah at the University of Virginia agrees. "As an isolated predictor, it falls short." As a sign of the weakness in cholesterol numbers alone, one large study found the average LDL cholesterol of people hospitalized for heart disease was 105, which is considered "near optimal."
The study, published in the American Heart Journal in 2009, found almost half of the hospital admissions had LDL cholesterol levels below 100, traditionally considered "low risk."
Another study found that only half of heart attacks occurred in people with high cholesterol (at or above 240), while a fifth of the heart attacks struck people whose cholesterol levels (below 200) deemed them safe based on long-held guidelines.
Most heart attacks are not caused by the slow narrowing of blood vessels but by a rupture of a blister or bubble of plaque in an artery that is less than 50 percent blocked. Half of all heart attacks come with no warning at all, making diagnostic tests all the more important. Dr. Gupta's advice:
A class of drugs called statins lowers LDL cholesterol. Exercise and a low-fat diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains and legumes can also lower LDL and raise HDL. Smokers who quit also improve their cholesterol numbers.
But the numbers themselves may be only the first step in learning your heart health.
From my perspective, very few people who need to lose weight and improve their blood lipid profiles will benefit from the ADA/AHA/USDA style diet described above. Whole grains, legumes, and fruits in particular are often trouble for folks struggling to emerge from metabolic syndrome or type II diabetes. That said, if that works for you, fantastic! But since that advice has been flouted for the last thirty or so years to little positive effect, I'm not optimistic that it will help a lot of people.
Lucky for you, you live in an age when don't have to rely on a doctor's advice to determine what type of diet is more healthy for you. You can use a blood glucose meter, and frequent tests of your fasting lipic profile, to get feedback from your body's reaction to any diet you want to test. Forget the bad science and the politically motivated advice from so called non-profit organizations.
When you get ready to try meat and vegetables, some nuts and seeds, little fruit and starch, and no sugar or wheat, I predict your triglycerides will decrease, your HDL will increase, your LDL will increase marginally but it will be the large, fluffy type of LDL which are regarded as benign, and your weight and blood pressure will also decrease, as will your appetite. With a few refinements from there, you can stare down the diseases of civilization while eating and living well.
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