Your Normal Cholesterol Is Lying — More Than an ApoB Test

The Problem with Standard Cholesterol Testing00:00

You did everything right. You changed your diet. You started exercising. Maybe you lost weight. You went back to your doctor's office expecting good news. And your cholesterol number barely moved. That's one of the most frustrating moments in medicine. And it happens to people every single day. Not because they failed, but because they were chasing the wrong number.

I'm Dr. Kabir Harricharan Singh, a physician who's board certified in both family and obesity medicine. And here's why this happens and why the fix starts with understanding something your standard cholesterol test was never designed to show you.

To not over complicate this, I want you to imagine your cardiovascular system is a city delivery network. Your liver is the factory. It builds the delivery vehicles that carry cholesterol through your body. Your gut is the loading dock. It loads up vehicles with cholesterol from the food you eat. Your arteries are the highway, the roads those vehicles travel on. And your heart, your brain, your legs, and all your organs are the places the cholesterol needs to arrive to.

Now, a standard cholesterol test is like sending one person to stand at one spot on one road and count roughly how much cholesterol is passing by. They give you a number, but that number doesn't tell you how many vehicles are actually out there across the entire highway system. It doesn't tell you how big the vehicles are. It doesn't tell you whether the road is damaged. It doesn't tell you whether the cholesterol is even reaching its destination, and it doesn't tell you if the factory is producing too many vehicles or if the loading dock is accepting too many deliveries.