Should We Test Teens for High Cholesterol?

Sure, why not? We'll ban salt, tax soft drinks, and test for obesity. The government knows what's best, the government knows all the solutions. Meanwhile we'll do nothing to address the real problems of obesity, like HFCS, MSG, aspartame, and other unlisted chemicals that are among the leading causes of obesity and diabetes, and other chemicals and processes, such as chlorinated water or homogenization of dairy products, which damage our arteries and are the real cause of heart disease (your cholesterol count is an insignificant factor).

And while I'm on a rant here, rather than deal with the root causes of harmful e coli bacteria found in our food - in large part feeding cows GM corn and grains, instead of what they were meant to eat - grass - - we bleach the meat and treat it with ammonia and other disgusting products that you wouldn't eat if you knew they were there. If you haven't figured it out by now, the government almost always creates the problem, and then their solution is invariably to make the problem worse, by attacking the symptoms of the problem rather than the root causes. This is usually not an accident - be it in agriculture, medicine, economics or foreign policy.

ABC News -

As many as one in five American adolescents has LDL (bad) cholesterol levels that are too high and HDL (good) cholesterol levels that are too low -- a fact that many doctors say means that it may be time to start regular cholesterol screening as part of back-to-school check-ups.

According to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American teens -- already identified as too often out-of-shape and overweight -- are also at risk for cholesterol problems once thought to be seen only in the middle-aged.

The CDC, which released the new cholesterol findings the Jan. 22 issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, said high triglyceride levels are also a problem for adolescents.

The numbers come from a nationwide survey conducted from 1999 through 2006 known as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). This survey found that 20.3 percent of 12- to 19-year-olds had higher-than-normal levels of LDL cholesterol or triglycerides, or low levels of HDL cholesterol.