How to preserve healthy cholesterol levels?
For the sake of better understanding of the cholesterol profile results and maintain healthy cholesterol levels, physicians have developed guidelines for cholesterol numbers. For total cholesterol, the numbers less than 200 mg/dl is optimal, and the total level should not raise upper than 240 mg/dl in order to avoid the risk of various heart diseases. For LDLC, less than 100 mg/dl is good, and the total level should be kept below 160 mg/dl. And finally, an optimal HDL cholesterol level value is set above 60 mg/dl, and should be sustained above 40 mg/dl for men and above 50 mg/dl for women to avoid excessive LDLC accumulation in the blood and along the artery walls. These figures can be used as a guideline to determine healthy cholesterol ratios as well. Let’s see: patient who has total cholesterol number 200, LDLC number 100, and HDLC number 60 has a Total/HDL cholesterol ratio of 200/60 and an LDLC/HDLC ratio of 100/60. This allows to identify an optimal Total/HDLC ratio of about 3.3:
