The optimal LDL cholesterol level is probably 50 or 70 mg/dL, and apparently, the lower, the better. That’s where you start out at birth, that’s the level seen in populations largely free of heart disease, and that’s the level at which the progression of atherosclerosis appears to stop in cholesterol-lowering trials.28 An LDL around 70 mg/dL corresponds to a total cholesterol reading of about 150, the level below which no deaths from coronary heart disease were reported in the famous Framingham Heart Study,
