Every one must be familiar with Blood test for finding out the cholesterol levels in your blood.
Most of the people are aware that the patient is advised not to eat any food or drink any thing for upto 12 hours before the blood test for Lipid profile (Cholesterol) test.
The oils and FATs that a person ingests gets into blood to be transferred to cells and tissues for cellular metabolism.
Oils and FATs that can not be used by cells immediately are stored for future use in the tissues.
If a person consumes too much oils / FATs on a regular basis, a limit will be reached when the cells and tissues will not be able to store any more oils and FATs for future use.
When this limit is reached the cells stop picking up oils from the blood, hence the oils / cholesterol levels could be found elevated in the blood.
Usually it is expected that cells will pick up oils from blood within 12 hours from the time of consumption, hence patient is asked not to eat or drink anything 12 hours before a lipid profile test is done.
There could be various other situations which can cause the blood to hold on high levels of oils even after 12 hours.
- A day when very high amounts of oils or diary products are consumed.
- A day when the fluid intake is extremely high.
- A day when salt consumption is very high.
- any other event which could adversely affect oil metabolism.
So the lipid profile test only indicates the excess amount of oils in the blood and some thing that has gone wrong in last 12 hours.
The question is when should a person be really concerned.
When the stores of oils of a person are full and cells stops picking the oils for use in future.
There is simple test for the above purpose which is much more accurate and reliable.
Pinch the skin of the back of your hand with firmness for about 5-10 seconds.
Release the skin of back of your hand.
The skin must regain the old shape within one second or less. If the skin regains the old shape in less then 1 second every thing is all right and if it takes longer then 1 second than one needs to read home page of this web site and few more pages. LOL