LDL is a dynamic marker hugely influenced by food

• Doctors in general pay little attention to food intake in consideration of cholesterol or heart risk and receive little nutrition education.
  
• Familial hypercholesteralaemia caused a general perception that high cholesterol is bad news for anyone. I have recently that the risk from FH reduces as one ages.
  
• Studies have shown that higher total cholesterol is a good thing as one ages.
  
• Cholesterol is necessary to absorb vitamin D which is essential and studies have shown increasing levels of vitamin D deficiency
  
• Drugs can heavily influence LDL but not yet HDL or Trigs- as such medicine has focused on LDL.
• Diet can influence HDL and Trigs AND LDL
• LCHF will increase HDL ( which is good) reduce Trigs ( which is good) and may or may not change LDL. What is will almost certainly do is put the ratio of HDL/ LDL into an ideal range
• Some people may find a big increase in LDL at the same time as they increase HDL and lower Trigs. These are called hyper responders and they are refusing statins because they see no evidence that the high LDL they have is actually unhealthy and all their ratios remain good
• These hyper responders led by @DaveKeto are showing that LDL is dramatically influenced by the foods eaten in the few days before a blood test - inversely to expectations. i.e. the lower the fat content of your diet , the higher the trigs and the higher the LDL and total cholesterol so anyone who prepares for a blood test by "being good" as many of us do, is probably making their own figures worse.
  
• The fact that LDL changes so dramatically based on diet, when no-one is even asking about diet, seems to me to render most of the studies about LDL utterly meaningless, akin to testing breath ketones and not knowing if the person doing the test had been drinking.

Bluetit1802 said:

Interesting post.

I have experienced something very odd during 2017.
I was diagnosed in January 2014 and was put on simvastatin. (I knew no different then so took them for around 3 months)
I took myself off statins and for the next 3 years my cholesterol, HDL, LDL and trigs were perfect with excellent ratios.
I lost all my excess weight within the first 10 months after diagnosis and followed the LC diet throughout.
Fastforward to June 2017 my LDL increased and my HDL dropped a little. Trigs still low. Ratios still excellent.
Then in November 2017 my LDL increased again, HDL dropped a bit more, and trigs increased a bit. Ratios still excellent but not as good as previously.

I wasn't happy. Nothing had changed in my routine - BUT in the 2 weeks prior to the November test I was ill and taking paracetamols, although eating normally.

I have no other explanation as to why this happened.

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Bluetit1802 said:

My HDL is a lot higher than yours. It dropped from 2.51 to 2.47 then to 2.1.
Trigs/HDL ratio dropped from 0.24 to 0.42.
LDL increased from 2.8 to 3.4 to 3.6.

Yes, I eat saturated fat and the amount has never changed. My diet as a whole has not changed.

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