What Is the Normal Range of Cholesterol Levels?

Before you can decide what to do about your cholesterol first you need to know whether your readings are in the normal range of cholesterol levels. So you call your doctor, who in turn sends you over to the lab, where they unceremoniously take 20 milliliters (ml) of bright, red blood. As your arm starts to hurt on the way home you wonder whether it was all worth it. After all, maybe not knowing that eating your beloved sausage and eggs, cooked in high saturated fat butter, is bad for the normal range of cholesterol levels would have been a better plan.

After a few days you get a call from your doctor's office, wanting to talk to you about your cholesterol. So you march right over and are ushered into a the waiting room, where your doc is waiting. He says "Jim, I am looking at your numbers and what have you been eating every meal, sausage and eggs cooked in 37% saturated fat butter?". You look at the doc in disbelief, and wonder whether you have mistakenly gone to a the earthly headquarters of the local psychic.

Your doctor explains the numbers starting with total cholesterol of 320, and move on to some strange terms such as LDL levels of 200 and HDL levels of 40. He goes on to explain that normal desirable levels of cholesterol are around 200 mg/dl, which means you should have 200 milligrams of total cholesterol in every deciliter (1/16 liter) of blood. Optimal levels of LDL or bad cholesterol should be about 100 mg/dl, and a good reading for helpful HDL cholesterol should be about 55 or 60 mg/dl. He goes on to say that these reading are not even close to being in a normal range of cholesterol levels and put you in the high risk category for heart attack or stroke. He then gives you a preprinted list of low cholesterol foods and warns that if we can't get this under control through diet then we will have to consider a statin medication to rapidly bring these dangerous numbers down.

As you are driving home your head is spinning and thoughts are racing through your head about that silly list of low cholesterol foods filled with no fat and low fat choices. Give up ice cream and butter for fruit and margarines containing stanols and sterols! I don't think so. Not in this lifetime! There has to be another way to bring my readings down into a normal range of cholesterol levels.

The next day you wake up with a better attitude, and decide to try some of these low cholesterol foods, after all no one wants to have a heart attack or stroke.

What Next? Achieving a normal range for cholesterol levels, in most cases, is about changing old habits, adopting new healthier habits, and enlisting the help of convention medications such as statins or lowered-cholesterol.com natural cholesterol reducing remedies if needed. Put simply, this basically means finding ways to increase HDL (good cholesterol), decrease LDL (bad cholesterol levels) and lower total cholesterol, either through natural means or with the help of medications or natural cholesterol reducing remedies.

Rob D. Hawkins is an enthusiastic advocate for the use of safe and effective high quality alternative health products and natural living, with over 10 years experience in the field. Learn more about natural remedies and natural health at purchaseremedies.com Purchase Remedies.com