@David1 The diet-heart hypothesis (that eating fat causes coronary heart disease) is backed up by almost no data whatsoever. The key study underlying this hypothesis has been shown to be fraudulent. Various large government-funded studies to determine the link between LDL-cholesterol and cardiovascular disease have either failed to show a correlation, or shown a negative correlation (i.e., higher LDL correlates with lower cardiovascular disease), or shown that higher LDL lowers all-cause mortality. These are important studies, among them the Minnesota Coronary Study, the Framingham Study (still ongoing), the Nurses’ Study, the Women’s Health Initiative, and MRFIT.
Furthermore, it has been shown that the best indicators for cardiovascular risk are HbA1C and the ratio of triglycerides to HDL. Your ratio is 0.52, which is superb, anything under 0.9 being considered an indicator of low or no risk for cardiovascular disease. If your physician had ordered an NMR test of your LDL, I am confident it would have shown that your LDL falls into the healthy Type A pattern.
If you want a real assessment of your cardiovascular damage and risk for the future, ask for a CAC (coronary arterial calcium) scan. A score under 100 indicates no risk of cardiovascular disease. Higher scores indicate some arterial damage, but the absolute value of your score is not as important as the trend, as it has been shown that a stable or decreasing CAC score is an indicator of very low cardiovascular risk.
For more information on the CAC score and its meaning, check out www.thefatemperor.com, which is a site run by Ivor Cummins, a software engineer who specialises in medical trouble-shooting. He aggregates information about cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. For more information about lipidology in general and cholesterol in particular, check out www.cholesterolcode.com, a site run by another software engineer, Dave Feldman, who is a citizen-scientist doing some fascinating research.