Welcome to the Fat Emperor podcast. I'm your host, Ivor Cummins. We're supported by the Irish Heart Disease Awareness charity, which advocates a simple CT scan to reveal your CAC score. So know your score and take action to prevent that premature heart attack. Everything you need to know will be right here.

Welcome to another Fat Emperor podcast short where we'll clarify science and health matters.

So they can better understand how to optimize your health.

So today we're going to talk about the cholesterol story.

We're going to keep it short and sweet and give some of the basics.

So what's the real story with LDL the bad cholesterol and indeed HDL the good cholesterol?

Well, let's take a look.

So first thing we should note is that 25 years ago, William P. Castelli, the Framingham director, the biggest heart study ever done, indicated that unless LDL levels were very, very high. So 7.8 millimolar, that's around 300 milligrams per decaleter for LDL alone.

So unless they were really that high,

the LDL measure on its own was not much value in isolation

for predicting coronary heart disease events.

So that's important to note.

LDL is a very dependent variable.

Whether or not there could be a problem depends hugely on many other more important variables.

Another thing that Castelli said is that the ratios of your cholesterol are vastly more important in all of the studies.

And that's remained so to this day, or more years later so the ratio of your total

cholesterol number to your HDL good cholesterol number or the ratio of your triglycerides to your

HDL are much much more predictive for reasons we now understand so that's another key intro to this talk.

So cholesterol units 101.

There are different units used around the world and this can cause a lot of confusion.

So we have American units and European units primarily.

So pretty simply if you have American units here, you know, in

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