MECHANISM ENGINE
What Are Triglycerides?
Mine were properly high once. Not borderline, properly over. My GP flagged it straight away, and I remember not really understanding what the number meant beyond a vague sense that it was fat in my blood, which isn’t quite right either.
Flat-Pack Furniture in the Fat Cell
Triglycerides are how fat travels and gets stored, three fatty acids bolted onto a glycerol backbone, like a flat-pack wardrobe assembled and ready to go into the spare room. Once it’s built and in the fat cell, it’s too big and bulky to just wander back out again on its own. It needs insulin to be low before the cell gets permission to break it back down into pieces small enough to leave. High triglycerides on a blood test usually means there’s more flat-pack furniture arriving than there is room being cleared, often because insulin’s rarely low enough, for long enough, for the door to open.
Triglycerides are the main form of fat circulating in the blood and stored in fat tissue. Levels rise after eating, particularly with high sugar or refined carbohydrate intake, and are cleared from the blood over the following hours, faster with regular movement and lower insulin exposure. Chronically high fasting triglycerides are linked to cardiovascular risk and often travel alongside insulin resistance, making the two worth reading together rather than in isolation.
NHS guidance sets a healthy fasting triglyceride level below 1.7 mmol/L, with levels above 2.3 mmol/L generally prompting further GP review alongside the rest of the lipid panel.
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Related mechanisms
Educational content only, not medical advice. Never stop or change medication without your GP’s supervision. Neil stopped his own medications in February 2024 on his own initiative and told his GP afterwards, with NHS blood tests to show. That is not the approach recommended here. Speak to your GP before changing your fasting pattern, diet, or medication.
What this is based on
NHS and NICE guidance, cross-referenced against Neil’s own NHS blood test record going back to April 2012. See the full timeline and current numbers.