Introduction to Cholesterol
Monday, November 9th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
When many people discuss the term cholesterol, they assume that this is a bad thing that is somehow caused by external circumstances. If you could eliminate those circumstances, your body would have no more cholesterol and you would be fine.
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.
There are two major types of cholesterol. LDL or Low Density Lipoproteins, and HDL or High Density Lipoproteins. LDL is considered to be the “bad” guy. It carriers fatty deposits from the liver to other parts of the body where it is (normally) needed. The “good” guy here is HDL, which carries excess fatty deposits back from all over the body to the liver where it is recycled or discarded.
When this system starts to function improperly, either because of it not being able to deliver enough fat to the rest of the body, or not being able to get excess fat back to the liver, to be recycled or excreted, the result is a cholesterol imbalance. This in turn leads to build-up in your arteries, heart disease etc.
One of the most important causes of cholesterol levels going haywire is to put it bluntly: eating too much, and eating the wrong food. In times gone by, our forebears had a more active lifestyle. If they ate a lot of fatty food, the body used that to provide energy, and no harmful substances were stored, no balances disturbed. In our time we eat way too much fatty food, which our bodies don’t need, and has no other plan with than to store it in the form of fat. The balance of HDL and LDL in our bodies becomes disturbed, and this results in the build-up of fatty tissue in our arteries, often clogging them.
Another major cause of cholesterol is smoke inhalation – either by smoking yourself, or being subjected to passive smoking. Most people are probably unaware that cigarettes contain poison. The name of that poison is acrolein, and it can also be found in pesticides and chemical weapons! The reason why this causes the breakdown of our cholesterol system is that it interferes with the functioning of both bad and good cholesterol. Good cholesterol loses its ability to carry fatty stuff back to the liver to be destructed; bad cholesterol is attacked so badly that its cellular structure is altered, causing it to malfunction completely.
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.
In our hard-eating, hard-drinking, heavy-smoking, no-exercise society all the above factors often combine to form a deadly cocktail of cholesterol ending in heart disease and death. Cholesterol is in fact one of the major causes of death all over the world.
Would you like to learn more about foods that lower cholesterol? Read other article at cholesterol diet
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