Cholesterol - Help please

Those figures would give you a total cholesterol figure of 6.2. GPs follow NICE guidelines that total cholesterol for T2s should be 4 or less. My total cholesterol figure was 6.1 at my HbA1c test last September, and my GP wanted me to go back on statins, which I had stopped taking.
She referred me for another cholesterol test after 6 months, and my total had gone down to 5.7. I still decline to take statins.
My ratios are good.

Your ratios are in the risk range, so you should think about whether you want to take statins or not. But they should improve with LCHF.
You can get your ratios by entering your figures on here: http://www.hughcalc.org/chol-si.php

grante said:

How can I turn my Cholestrol level around ? Doctor wants me on statins but I have said no for now.

Trigs May 17 was 2.9mmol/l now 1.6
Hdl May 17 was 0.73 mmol/l now 0.68
Ldl May 17 was ? Now 4.8mmol/l

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Are you eating a lot of saturated fats?

Hi @grante ..
LCHF reduces cholestorol for many people .. also, you say that you do not want to take them, but have you tried statins? If so, did you suffer from their side effects? Many people do not want to take them because they have read about the side effects and that they are not "good" in the long term. For me, I took 1 x 10 mg Atorvastatin a day from when I was diagnosed in Feb, had no problems with them at all .. and stopped them by choice a couple of months later. My cholestrol and trigs came back into line by the time of my first annual review in May ..

grante said:

I am eating more saturated fats than I used to do

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They push my cholesterol though the ceiling.

The damage from high blood sugar is immediate, the damage from high cholesterol if any is not so immediate, I would concentrate on getting your blood sugars under control then worry about cholesterol.

The choice to take statins or not is yours, I personally had no real problems with them.

grante said:

I'm feeling fed up

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Please don't be fed up.

I think I mentioned on your other thread that the best foods for increasing HDL and lowering LDL are:

oily fish (at least 3 meals a week) especially salmon
avocado
olive oil/rapeseed oil
flax seed
chia seed
almonds, pistachios, peanuts
red wine

and exercise.

Carbohydrate depletes HDL

I eat saturated fats and am very low carb/high fat. My HDL is 2.51 (increased from 1.44 on diagnosis)

grante said:

When I was first diagnosed I felt lost and didn't know what to do. Then i read Dr Cavan book and here I am 2 months later with a hba1c at 59 which is down from 102. But I find my cholesterol is messed up

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Well, I take metformin, (but have normal hba1c, I take it for it's other benefits). I'd take statins if I needed to, but it seems pointless changing your diet and swapping one drug for another if you are trying to be drug free.
(And many on here seem to hate statins with a vengeance)
I just found avoiding saturated fats works for me.
However, I'm not LCHF, so it's fairly easy as I don't eat a vast amount of fat anyway.

I went back on statins after yrs of under 5 as a total. I even had a 3.9 whilst not on statins.
I've been having horrendeous feet cramps and pins and needles in my lower arms and hands, bad enough to keep me awake so.......I stopped my statins which cardiologist wanted me to take. I have to tell gp when I see him next. He will understand as I have had good results on my own, even in poor controlled diabetes times.
I was cleared from cardiologist in May as my invasive investigations proved just mild heart disease which can be reversed once I can exercise well again. (After bariatric surgery).
High levels of cholesterol and smoking are the biggest risks to heart problems.
6s aren't hugely high but I think women are allowed more than men as a safe level. It just needs a tweak.
Walking more does it for me!

I suspect that whilst a person is lowering their blood glucose with low carb and also losing weight, that the cholesterol readings do not have much meaning as there is an lot going on in the body.
I certainly don't want to take statins again - nor Metformin, as they had such dreadful effects on my mind and body, and I'd rather work on the problems through a natural balancing method than by taking tablets of any kind.

grante said:

I'm feeling fed up

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Well there's no need.. for a start your cholesterol may be off because you are loosing weight. Secondly it might not matter anyway. Your trigs have gone down which is generally thought of as good. Personally I don't care what my levels are as they vary throughout the day ( I understand from my reading) so looking at one level is like taking a one off finger prick. I'm not convinced that sat fats raise the levels anyway. But mostly I don't believe in artificially lowering production of something we need to survive. Others have different opinions but I'm not so sure that the science currently used is correct and there are huge financial forces at play to get more people onto statins.

@douglas99 out of interest how did/do you manage to get your GP to continue prescribing Metformin ?

I stupidly stopped taking it a few months after diagnosis and despite my continued pleading I can't get it re-prescribed although I like you think it has numerous other benefits.

britishpub said:

@douglas99 out of interest how did/do you manage to get your GP to continue prescribing Metformin ?

I stupidly stopped taking it a few months after diagnosis and despite my continued pleading I can't get it re-prescribed although I like you think it has numerous other benefits.

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Ask another gp for a cover gp. They have their own ways to support lower bgs.
Failing that ask to be referred to the endocologist for a more superior decision.

bulkbiker said:

Well there's no need.. for a start your cholesterol may be off because you are loosing weight. Secondly it might not matter anyway. Your trigs have gone down which is generally thought of as good. Personally I don't care what my levels are as they vary throughout the day ( I understand from my reading) so looking at one level is like taking a one off finger prick. I'm not convinced that sat fats raise the levels anyway. But mostly I don't believe in artificially lowering production of something we need to survive. Others have different opinions but I'm not so sure that the science currently used is correct and there are huge financial forces at play to get more people onto statins.

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I prefer to stay in the middle, not too high, not too low, and go with all the published bathtub curves, that show the mid point is the sweet spot, rather than a dubious forced line that shows the higher cholesterol the better.
But you pay your money, you take your choice, this is one were you probably live or die from your choices and there's no going back from that.
We all choose that though, I'll walk around strange cities at night where others won't, so we all trade off lifestyle to life expectancy, so I doubt cholesterol will ever play a part in my demise.

britishpub said:

@douglas99 out of interest how did/do you manage to get your GP to continue prescribing Metformin ?

I stupidly stopped taking it a few months after diagnosis and despite my continued pleading I can't get it re-prescribed although I like you think it has numerous other benefits.

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It was asked at my last couple of reviews.
We discussed it, and in the end the DN agreed I would be happier overall staying on it.
Maybe she thought it was a safety blanket, maybe she thought it was helping me, maybe she thought mentally I needed it.
But we do talk well, and she agreed it I wanted to stay on it I should.
But I do know how it works, I do know it's other benefits, and I do know it really has little effect on T2, so maybe that helped sway her.

I need to brush up on my people skills

I don't think telling the DN she was "bonkers" to think my T2D was "resolved" helped me a lot.....

grante said:

How can I turn my Cholesterol level around ?

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As you can imagine, it's a very contentious issue and everyone's experience is different. It is such a personal thing that only you can decide whether to take them. Have you tried and been put off by experiencing side effects? That's the best reason for not taking them, maybe the only reason for not taking them.

As Prem51 says:

Using Friedewalde

LDL Cholesterol = Total Cholesterol - HDL cholesterol - Total Triglyceride / 2.19

4.8 = TC - 0.68 - 1.6 / 2.19

TC = 4.8 + 0.68 + 0.73 = 6.2

As for controlling total cholesterol, I found personally, so will probably be different to others, low carbs helped a lot, high fat did not. In fact without cream and yoghurt my TC was 4, it was 5.7 when I tried to increase fat.

Just as some extra info, I took Atorvastatin for 17 years and for the first 5 years I tolerated being lied to by my GP at the time when looking for an explanation of my intense muscle pain. He had a different excuse every year, until I found the Merck Pharmaceutical patent explanation which explained exactly why I experienced muscle pain. They were actually trying to patent a version of a statin with CoQ10 to overcome "impending muscle pain" as they put it. It's also worth noting that it doesn't affect everyone the same way.

You might also like to look at the British Heart Foundation's figures on Total Cholesterol / Cardio Vascular Disease. I have a graph from several years ago, you might like to check the BHF's website for something more up to date.