The following is an adaption of content found on Dr. Mercola’s web site.

Other Heart Disease Predictors that May Be Even More Important than Your Cholesterol Levels

Another predictor of heart disease (in addition to a high cholesterol/HDL ratio) is your triglyceride to HDL ratio. In combination, high triglycerides and low HDL levels are an even bigger risk and are even more important to your heart health than the standard good vs. bad cholesterol ratio.

Simply divide your triglycerides level with your HDL to get this ratio. That percentage should be below 2.

One study found that people with the highest ratio of triglycerides to HDL had 16 times the risk of heart attack as those with the lowest ratio of triglycerides to HDL. So while you strive to keep your HDL cholesterol levels up, you’ll want to decrease your triglycerides.

How can you increase your good HDL cholesterol?
You can increase your HDL levels by exercising and getting plenty of omega-3 fats like those from krill oil. Triglycerides are easily decreased by exercising and avoiding grains and sugars in your diet.

As Dr. Mercola has been warning since around 2004, conventional medicine misses the boat entirely when they recommend that lowering cholesterol is the way to reduce your risk of heart attacks, because what is actually needed is to address whatever is causing your body damage — and leading to increased inflammation and then increased cholesterol.

What’s the safest most effective way to treat high total cholesterol?

Dr. Mercola has written many articles warning about the dangers of using statin drugs to treat high cholesterol, and equally many advising you on the proper ways to normalize your levels.

There are simple, basic strategies that can help you regulate your cholesterol.

First, you need to understand that simply lowering your dietary cholesterol intake is not an effective primary strategy. This is because 75 percent of your cholesterol is produced by your liver, which is influenced by your insulin levels.

Therefore, if you want to regulate your cholesterol levels, you need to optimize your insulin levels. High insulin levels also increase inflammation in your body, which is a primary reason why your body increases its cholesterol production. So the two – insulin and cholesterol — are tightly linked.

One of the most powerful ways you can optimize your insulin levels is by exercising, and paying attention to the foods you eat. Remember, foods that increase your insulin levels will also contribute to high cholesterol by making your liver produce more of it.

Here are his primary recommendations for safely lowering and regulating your cholesterol levels:

1. Get an appropriate amount of exercise.
2. Reduce, with the plan of eliminating, grains and sugars in your daily diet, especially fructose.
3. It is VITAL to keep your total fructose level below 25 grams a day.  That means no sodas or colas or other high fructose drinks.
4. Eat the right foods for your nutritional type.
5. Eat a good portion of your food raw.
6. Make sure you’re getting plenty of high-quality, animal-based omega3-fats. Dr. Mercola prefers those from krill oil.   Fish oil from small fish is the next best option.  That’s because the larger the fish, the more mercury it contains.

Dr. Mercola claims that he has treated between 20,000 and 30,000 patients, and he’s only found about five people out of that total who were unable to respond to the recommendations he has given here. In these cases they likely had a condition called familial hypercholesterolemia.

It is extremely rare, affecting about one in 1,000 people who are on cholesterol lowering medication, but for those there may actually be some benefit to taking a statin drug.

Some have asked him about taking red rice yeast to control their cholesterol, and there is some confusion on that issue. Please understand that red rice extract is also a statin drug found in a natural state, with the same exact mechanism of action as other statins, even though it’s available over the counter.

The issue of cholesterol (and cholesterol-lowering drugs) is so fraught with misunderstanding and misinformation that he wrote a 17-page special report to shed some more light on the facts. It’s available for free at this link, and if you have not yet read it, we strongly urge you to do so now.

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