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What Is CLC in Cholesterol Tests?

The most important thing to know about your CLC numbers in cholesterol tests is that they are irrelevant to your health. When testing for cholesterol levels, doctors and you are looking for bad cholesterol--low density lipoproteins ( LDL); good cholesterol--high density lipoproteins (HDL); total cholesterol levels and triglyceride amounts. The CLC numbers are not relevant to you or your health; they are being studied for their application for making bull sperm last longer at greater fertility rates at lower temperatures.

  1. A Primer on Cholesterol

    • LDL, HDL, total cholesterol and triglycerides will tell you your risk for heart disease. CLC (cholesterol-loaded cyclodextrin) will hurt you only if you try to pronounce it three times fast. Total cholesterol numbers will tell you little. A high total cholesterol number may be mostly good cholesterol and a little bad cholesterol. You want to know about the LDL and HDL. LDL is bad because it spreads cholesterol around and lets it linger in your body, building up in unhealthy ways. HDL is good because it rushes cholesterol to your liver which gets rid of it.

    CLC

    • Cyclodextrin is irrelevant to your risk for heart disease or any other threatening condition, or doctors and you would pay attention to it in blood test results. However, cattle ranchers found great interest in CLC because it allowed them to freeze bull semen at lower temperatures for longer periods of time resulting in higher fertility rates when inseminating cattle.

    Research on Cow Ejaculate

    • Adding CLC to ejaculate showed greater percentages of live sperm compared with control samples (those samples without CLC), although the mobility of sperm in both were the same. This indicates an increased virility in CLC-treated ejaculates. According to a study by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the process is a simple one and can be used in either fresh ejaculate or introduced in freezing ejaculate protocols.

    Full Circle

    • If you're a beef eater, this can be both good and bad news. If you have high LDL levels, and CLC promotes the production of more cattle, there will be more successful cattle insemination, more cattle, more beef and if you eat more beef, it may not necessarily be good for your LDL levels. Cattle ranchers gain efficiency in production which helps hold down the cost of raising cattle; insemination is but one and a minor factor in determining beef prices. Nonetheless, those with bad LDL levels not only have more beef beckoning for grilling, it's cheaper too.

    Heevahava

    • The subject matter of CLC application is an unusual one to about 99.9 percent of the world's population. While CLC has proven effective in fertilization of cattle, it begs the question of how one obtains bull ejaculate. Prior to the advent of actually injecting semen to produce cattle, the male and female had to be physically introduced for insemination. The person to make such introductions in old Pennsylvania German was known as a heevahava, who would be paid to guide the delivery of the male reproductive organ into the female. Science has advanced the process and success rates of insemination have risen dramatically, but one still needs the bull semen to impregnate the female after it has been CLC treated. It's a subject not often raised at cocktail parties.

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