My age 55 Cholesterol 268. Is it dangerous. What to do now ?

Total cholesterol 268 mg/dL comes under high risk category. You should take statin for the rest of your life.

Adopt DASH diet (Mediterranean diet). Eat a low-cholesterol, low-fat diet, which includes cottage cheese, fat-free milk, fish, vegetables, poultry, and egg whites. Use monounsaturated oils such as olive, peanut, and canola oils or polyunsaturated oils such as corn, safflower, soy, sunflower, cottonseed, and soybean oils. Avoid foods with excess fat in them such as meat (especially liver and fatty meat), egg yolks, whole milk, cream, butter, shortening, pastries, cakes, cookies, gravy, peanut butter, chocolate, olives, potato chips, coconut, cheese (other than cottage cheese), coconut oil, palm oil, and fried foods.

You don't want to lower total cholesterol. You want to raise HDL. In fact, it's the total cholesterol to HDL ratio you want to lower. Mathematically you could try to lower cholesterol, but biologically that's bad.

Cholesterol isn't the bad guy in the body. In fact cholesterol is used for the growth and repair of every cell in the body. It's absolutely essential. And your body produces most of its own cholesterol.

When you have inflammation in the arteries your body produces LDL cholesterol to perform repairs. The LDL acts somewhat like band-aids over the inflammation. When the repair is completed it's the HDL that comes along to remove the "used" LDL. That's the proper function. But when you don't have enough HDL the LDL can't be removed so you end up with plaques - or Heart Disease.

Now the problem with reducing LDL should now be clear. Your body produces LDL when it has inflammation. So if you try to reduce LDL you are fighting your body's normal repair functions and so you prevent the repairs from taking place. That's bad.

Increasing HDL is the only healthy answer.

And guess what? After all these years of telling us that fat and cholesterol is bad, it's the saturated fat that helps to raise HDL cholesterol and that protects us from Heart Disease!

This is one of the reasons I enjoy bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning. Well, this morning I had three eggs and two pork sausages cooked in dripping for a roast the other day. And my latest lipid blood-work results were fantastic!

The cause of the inflammation is carbs - sugars and starches. Avoid them.

I think it's funny that when someone says "military" so many people assume infantry. The vast majority of people in the military are not "direct operational." For every person "at the pointy end of the stick," there are dozens of people in support functions at hospitals, in chapels, in pay and records, in legal, etc., etc. If you CANNOT do a job, physically or otherwise, it's not called "age discrimination." It's more like natural selection. But the military routinely gives age waivers to medical and religious personnel as well as to others in critical staffing areas. Some military jobs require extensive education and do not require anyone to go run PT at 0430. And, for the record, there are some 55 year olds running marathons and triathalons, and a fair number of 18 year olds who never leave their couch and video games. To answer your question, I think the military should take anyone capable of doing the job without undue accomodations.

Eat better, exercise daily, lose weight.