The Washington Post

Admit it: You are utterly baffled by the government's latest guidelines on cholesterol management. You are so overwhelmed by the prospect of having to perform the calculations that you are tempted to retreat behind the comforting, gelatinous walls of your own ignorance.

So are we.

Happily, Consumer Reports, the independent rater of products and services, has posted on its Web site a handy interactive tool that spares you from having to do the math. The calculator presents a small window asking for seven pieces of information: gender, age, smoking status, total and HDL cholesterol numbers, systolic blood pressure and whether your blood pressure is being treated.

The site filters your data through the federal standards and kicks out a raw score and a percentage estimate of your likelihood of having a cardiac event in the next 10 years. Click again and the site takes you to an area that helps you match your scores with a treatment plan.

Oh, sure, there are plenty of footnotes and caveats and never-minds. But it's a useful simplification of an important calculation.

To find the tool, go to www.consumerreports.org, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on "Check Your Cholesterol Risk." When you arrive at Step 1, scroll down a bit until you find a line that says, "For an interactive version of the test, click here." If you don't opt for the interactive version, you can easily use the site's charts to tally your own score.