About Apolane
Apolane turns a cholesterol panel into a ranked, evidence-graded list of things that would actually move the number that matters. This page exists so you can judge whether to trust that ranking — who builds it, what it draws on, and where it stops.
Who writes this
Apolane is written and built by Pouya Rezazadeh, a software engineer whose day job is large-scale ranking and recommendation systems. That is the relevant expertise here: the hard part of this tool is ordering options against a specific person's gap, not knowing cholesterol facts that are already published.
It is an independent personal project. There is no company behind it, no institutional affiliation, no sponsorship, and no pharmaceutical or supplement funding. Nothing on the site is a paid placement.
What Apolane is not
No clinician has reviewed this site. Pouya is not a physician, a dietitian, or a licensed clinician of any kind. Plenty of health sites carry a “medically reviewed by” badge; this one will not carry one unless a real clinician has genuinely reviewed the content, and none has.
So Apolane does not diagnose, does not prescribe, and does not replace your doctor. Everything prescription-strength lives in a separate doctor-gated track precisely because those decisions are not ours to make. The numbers here are population averages; you are not a population average.
Where the numbers come from
- Risk-tier targets — the LDL 100 / 70 / 55 mg/dL and ApoB 90 / 80 / 65 mg/dL tiers come from the 2018 ACC/AHA cholesterol guideline (Circulation) and the 2019 ESC/EAS dyslipidaemia guideline (European Heart Journal) , with ApoB thresholds per ESC/EAS and AACC consensus. Being straight about a gap: the 2026 ACC/AHA/Multisociety dyslipidemia guideline restores explicit LDL-C goals, and the risk-tier table above has not yet been re-baselined against it. That work is queued. Where the guidance text already reflects 2026, it says so on the page.
- Lp(a) — the 125 nmol/L action threshold, the once-in-a-lifetime testing advice, and the refusal to convert between nmol/L and mg/dL follow the National Lipid Association and 2026 AHA guidance. The NLA gives a Class III (harm) recommendation against fixed-factor unit conversion, which is why Apolane will not do it. See the Lp(a) page.
- Intervention effect sizes — each of the 20 options carries a percent reduction taken as a mid-range value from meta-analyses, landmark randomised trials and guideline statements, plus an evidence grade (15 of them grade A). Published ranges are wide and individual response varies enormously; these are population midpoints used for ordering, not a promise about you.
How the ranking works
Every option is scored against your gap to target, not against a generic list. Four factors multiply together: how much of your gap the option would plausibly close, how feasible it is to actually sustain, how strong the evidence behind it is, and how accessible it is (free and over-the-counter scores higher than expensive or prescription-only). Change your numbers and the order changes, which is the entire point.
Options are split into two tracks: 11 you can act on yourself, and 9 that are doctor-gated. Anything that behaves like a drug sits in the second track even when you can buy it without a prescription.
Things Apolane deliberately refuses to say
A ranking engine is only as honest as the things it declines to rank. Each of the constraints below is encoded as a flag on the data rather than left to editorial discretion, so the engine cannot quietly drift past it — and 1 of the 21 interventions on file is documented but never scored or shown at all:
- Omega-3, aerobic exercise and cutting refined carbs are not LDL levers. They lower triglycerides. High-dose omega-3 can raise LDL. They score near zero on an ApoB or LDL objective, however good they are for you otherwise.
- Niacin is excluded entirely. AIM-HIGH and HPS2-THRIVE showed no benefit and net harm on top of a statin. It is never surfaced, at any rank.
- Red yeast rice is treated as a drug. It contains monacolin K, which is chemically lovastatin. It is doctor-gated rather than offered as a free “start today” option, and the supplement is unregulated in dose.
- Fibre effects are not summed. Viscous-fibre options are sub-additive, so stacking four of them is capped rather than added up into a number that would be fiction.
Your data
Your lipid values never leave your browser. The plan is computed client-side and Apolane has no database to put them in. If you join the email list, the only thing sent anywhere is your email address, to the mail provider that delivers the re-test reminder. Every email carries a one-click unsubscribe.
Corrections
If something here is wrong — a threshold, an effect size, a citation — it should be fixed rather than defended. Errors on this subject matter more than most. Corrections and questions: hello@apolane.com.