Your HDL should pass your triglycerides by your mid-50s. Does it?

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Everyone wants the one number that predicts how well they’ll age.

After five years tracking biomarkers across more than 100 clients, I’ll give you mine. It isn’t a supplement, and it isn’t on your doctor’s radar.

It’s HDL.

And more precisely, it’s what your HDL does relative to your triglycerides as the years add up.

Here’s the pattern that hasn’t moved once in five years of plotting it. The people who live longer have higher HDL. And the non-insulin-resistant ones? It’s dramatically higher not just a little higher.

But the number by itself isn’t the signal. The crossover is. Somewhere in the mid-50s, in metabolically healthy people, HDL climbs up and passes triglycerides on the chart. HDL up, triglycerides down, the two lines crossing. In insulin-resistant people, that crossover never comes. Not once in my data. Their HDL Stays nearly flat while their birthdays pile up.

That single crossover tells me more about where a body is headed than a whole page of “normal” results. And it comes off two of the cheapest labs you can order. About ten dollars for the pair.

I laid the whole thing out in my latest video with the real scatter plots from my own data set. The chart below is the foundational one — HDL against age, the green line (non-insulin resistant) climbing steeply while the red line (insulin resistant) Stays nearly flat. The gap opens up hard after 40.

Watch the clip: https://youtu.be/AJnzQpXwqGQ?t=249​

Here’s the bottom line. Your labs tell a story your annual checkup skips right over. One biomarker, read in context — against age, against triglycerides, against insulin — says more about your trajectory than a stack of in-range numbers ever will. The “normal” panel isn’t wrong. It just isn’t looking.

That’s the whole reason I wrote Unlocking Optimal Metabolic Health: A Data-Driven Approach to Thriving at Any Age — to show you how to read your own labs, see the patterns, and act on real data instead of generic reference ranges.

📗 Grab the book Here: website​

Your labs are the map. The book is the guide.
Start with both.

Talk soon,
Dr. Karl Goldkamp

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