High Cholesterol And Home Testing Devices
Heart disease is the biggest killer in most countries in the Western world and it is becoming more prevalent in the Third World too as American-style junk food becomes more popular there as well. One aspect of heart disease is high blood pressure and another is a high level of LDL, or ‘bad’, cholesterol and triglycerides.
Because of this, lots of doctors reckon that all individuals more than the age of eighteen should have their cholesterol levels checked at least once a year, particularly if you know that your diet is pretty suspect or if you have genetic worries which mean that you will have high cholesterol.
Once you realize that you have a difficulty, then you should definitely have a check up each year and take some steps to minimize your consumption of foods that raise your cholesterol levels. Foods that fall into this category are those that contain saturated fats or hydrogenated, trans fats.
This basically means cutting out these fats. Saturated fats are predominant in red meats and full-fat dairy products like milk, butter, cheese, cream, and beef and pork. Hydrogenated trans fats are common in commercial junk food like hamburgers, hot dogs, potato crisps, potato chips, pies and pasties.
If you have high levels of blood fats like HDL cholesterol, LDL cholesterol and triglycerides you have to do something and that means that you have two choices: which means that you have to either introduce lifestyle alterations or take tablets for the remainder of your life.
If you would like to endeavour fixing the problem yourself without tablets but with your physician’s assistance, you will have to have frequent check ups to keep an eye on your progress or you could buy a home cholesterol monitor. If you take this route, you will need to understand the monitor’s readings.
There are usually three or four important readings: LDL, HDL, Total Cholesterol and Triglycerides. HDL (or ‘good cholesterol’ ought to be| 40 or more; LDL (or ‘bad cholesterol’) ought to be less than 100-130. However, most home testing kits will only give the total cholesterol level, which ought to be below 200.
This total cholesterol reading is not entirely satisfactory because you will not know the individual cholesterol levels. After all, under 200 can still be very, very bad. Even very dangerous. However, if you take a physician’s test every quarter and you test at home until you get a feel for the effect that the measures you are taking are having, you ought to bel all right between check ups.
However, these home test cholesterol monitors are becoming more and more advanced each year, so it is worth going to a large national chemists and seeing what is on sale from time to time. Anyway, if going to the GP is a problem or very costly, this may be your only option.
The reality is that home test kits are not very helpful yet, but they are better than nothing if used in conjunction with sceduled visits to the medical doctor, but on their own they do not give the whole picture and their results cannot be relied on as an indication that your cholesterol levels are safe.
Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on several subjects, but is now concerned with low fat low cholesterol diet. If you want to know more, please visit our web site at What Foods Lower Cholesterol?