What You Need To Know About Cholesterol
November 9, 2009 by Haman Oakley
Filed under Diet
There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding regarding cholesterol among the general public. Very often people think that they have no way of controlling cholesterol, or that it’s “all bad”. That only sick people have cholesterol.
That is not quite correct though. Cholesterol is actually present in every healthy human body. It is a fatty substance produced by the liver, and is involved in the production of hormones and the distribution of fats from the liver to and from other organs.
The two kinds of cholesterol are: Low Density Lipoproteins and High Density Lipoproteins. The first, LDL, is frequently referred to as the bad guy. In a normal body, it deals with the distribution of fatty material from the liver to other areas in your body. This is not necessarily a bad thing – it only becomes a problem when our bodies don’t need that fat! HDL is usually seen as the “good” guy. That is due to its involvement in the process of getting excess fat back from the rest of the body to the liver to be dealt with.
The bad news is that there are several factors, both external and internal that could cause HDL to drop below an acceptable level, and LDL to rise to a dangerous level. We will look at a few of those below.
The biggest single cause of cholesterol imbalance is probably just eating wrong, and eating too much for your lifestyle. The body’s cholesterol system can not cope with all this excess fat, it ends up in the bloodstream, starts to clog your arteries, eventually breaks up and causes a heart attack.
Another important contributing factor to cholesterol imbalance is smoking. Not many people know that cigarettes contain a highly toxic substance known as acrolein. This stuff is also present in pesticides and chemical weapons! It suppresses the normal functioning of LDL and HDL. One the one hand HDL no longer effectively carries excess fat from other areas of the body back to the liver to be destroyed or recycled, and LDL is oxidized in the whole process, changing it cellular structure and causing it to malfunction.
Something that not a lot of us know either, is the role of genetic factors in all of this. For a reason we don’t quite understand yet, about 70% of people suffer from a genetic disorder causing the production of good and bad cholesterol to become out of balance. Too much bad cholesterol – too little good cholesterol. And the system basically collapses.
On its own, any of the above factors will probably not be catastrophic. But when they are combined, as it very often happens in our society with too much food, too little exercise and lots of stress and smoking, it produces a deadly mix. No wonder cholesterol has become one of the major killers world wide.
Would you like to learn more about cholesterol diet tips? Read other article at low cholesterol diet
necklace (2)
top beauty products (2)
used tires (2)
Alba (1)
H Miracle (1)
I definitely have to agree with you as far as the proliferation of misinformation is concerned. Way too many people have high cholesterol and this false info isn’t really doing them any good. People also have trouble making small sacrifices in changing their diet. Hopefully things will begin to shift for the better.