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Lipoproteins and Simplenote

June 6, 2010 at 7:22 AM by Dr. Drang

Has this ever happened to you? You’re at a party and head into the kitchen for a snack. The room is filled with hot babes who surround you and…ask you about your cholesterol numbers. If it hasn’t, that’s probably because you haven’t reached middle age.

Cholesterol is slowly turning into a standard topic of conversation in my social group. The husbands are reaching the age where their doctors are telling them to alter their diets or take medication, and the wives are acting as enforcers. It’s common knowledge among this group that I’m using a statin drug (Simvastatin, which is the generic version of Zocor), so I often get asked about its effects and side effects.

Until recently, my cholesterol numbers were on a page in my daily planner, scribbled down while a nurse dictated them to me over the phone after my last test. This was not a very convenient place, so I typed them up in Simplenote. Now that they’re on my iPhone—and backed up on the web—I can whip out my numbers any time, anywhere. Impresses the hell out of the chicks.

At the end of the note with my test results, I added these tables with the current American Heart Association cholesterol guidelines1 and formatted them to fit nicely on a Simplenote page.

Here’s the text of the guidelines.

Total                       Category
< 200                       Desirable
200 - 239                   Borderline high
≥ 240                       High

Triglycerides            Category
< 150                        Normal
150 - 199                  Borderline high
200 - 499                  High
≥ 500                        Very high

HDL                       Category
≥ 60                        High; Optimal;
                                helps to lower
                                risk of heart
                                disease
< 40 in men and      Low; considered
< 50 in women          a risk factor
                                for heart disease

LDL                        Category
< 100                       Optimal
100 - 129                 Near optimal
130 - 159                 Borderline high
160 - 189                 High
≥ 190                       Very high

It looks crappy in a monospaced font, but lines up pretty well in Helvetica on the iPhone.

As you see, it includes the guidelines for total cholesterol, triglycerides, HDL, and LDL. Nobody seems to care about VLDL; it’s the Zeppo Marx of cholesterol.

Feel free to copy this info and take it with you to your next party. You’ll be a big hit with the MILFs.

  1. I used the tables at WebMD because their formatting made them easy to cut and paste into Simplenote. The numbers at the American Heart Association are the same. ↩

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