I find it strange that research of this scale is looking exclusively at a compound metric. TC is HDL (apo A-I), LDL, VLDL, IDL (apo B) and few more things. Its

I find it strange that research of this scale is looking exclusively at a compound metric. TC is HDL (apo A-I), LDL, VLDL, IDL (apo B) and few more things. Its different proportions of these things that define how healthy your cardiovascular system is, not the total sum. To complicate even more - those things are usually measured as concentrations (mass/volume) while much more important metric is particle count, but that’s not easy/cheap to measure. Considering how complex this system is, measuring TC is like measuring average body temperature in the hospital. It’s cool that they found a U-shape but this approach just makes patients(and doctors) hack the TC number without understanding how that affects lipoprotein composition and, subsequently, patient’s health.