Free The Animal

Following up from this, I don’t see how you could have a better lipid panel than this, which is a clip right off my Med record on Kaiser’s website, results obtained yesterday: Total Cholesterol is really a bullshit number, because observe that I could get to an “ideal” <200 by making my HDL worse, like say 50. Triglycerides way low, just like you want, and HDLs stratospheric, also, just like you want. LDL is only 4 points off “above optimal” figure of <100. The ratios are as follows: Total/HDL = 2.1 (average is 4-6 and ideal is 2-3; I’m on the extreme end of ideal) HDL/LDL = 1 (average is .3-.4 and ideal is above .4; again extreme end of ideal) Triglyceride/HDL = .4 (optimal is <2, so again, extreme end of ideal) While my fasting glucose seems high at 109, free insulin was only 6 (standard being 4-29, lower the better) and Glycohemoglobin (HGBA1C %) comes in at 4.8 (standard range 4.6 – 6 with the lower range being optimal). Glycohemoglobin is the percent of hemoglobin with sugar bound to it and doesn’t change very rapidly over time, while a blood glucose test is sugar levels at that moment,…

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Everybody knows that “good cholesterol” is good, right? Well, actually, none of you probably know that. You’ve heard it reported, your doctor has told you so, and so you believe that “good cholesterol” is actually good. Pay attention, because that’s not a trivial distinction and it has broad implications in all manner of knowledge. So, on the heals of my summary of the Cholesterol Con, there’s this: High Levels of “Good” Cholesterol May Be a Bad Thing A Dutch research study suggests that high levels of “good” HDL cholesterol are not so good – in fact, they may actually increase the risk of a cardiovascular event. Peter, the UK veterinarian of Hyperlipid runs down the details (thought: could veterinarians in general be smarter than doctors for humans, having to deal with the biology and metabolism of multiple species, thus having a more generalized — indeed principled — approach to medicine?). I think he gets to the bottom line. Are you seeing a pattern here? It all comes down to particle numbers, sizes, contents. What controls all of these? Not statin deficiencies, as in IDEAL. Forget your cholesterol. What marker predicts heart attacks and total mortality without all of the paradoxes?…

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Here we go, again. Listen: I may have a blog up tomorrow about gene expression, featuring the mightiest mouse you’ve ever seen, but the point is that we can overcome our genetic evolution: only about 999 out of a thousand ways are going to be bad. We do it everyday.

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