I had a physical last week for the first time in over a decade. Everything looks fine, although my cholesterol is a touch high. Not very, just a little over 100. Nothing to be alarmed about, but reading that over the weekend reminded me of a conversation I had a few months ago. It was at work, at the end of a couple hours of meetings with my client and a vendor.
It seems you can't get more than three adult men in a room for longer than about half an hour before someone starts talking about their cholesterol. In this case, the subject was brought up by my client, who had just been to the doctor and come home with one of those little blister-packs of Lipitor or whatever, and was doing that low-level lament that most of us go through when faced with involuntary lifestyle changes. I had little to say, since at the time it had been ten years or so since I'd had a checkup, and it wasn't something I was keenly interested in as it was. Anyway, this discussion was the first time I had heard that the goal was to get one's cholesterol down to, or below, 100.
According to the vendor rep, the trouble with this theory is that 100 is a very tough number to get to. His point was that it's difficult to expect an adult to maintain that level of cholesterol, considering the cholesterol level of a newborn is somewhere around 70.
It was then, after having nothing to say for most of the discussion, that I was finally able to contribute.
"Which is why," I said, "we don't eat babies."
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