Introduction to Cholesterol
Posted on 02. Nov, 2009 by Haman Oakley in Diet & Nutrition
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.
Technically this is not correct. In fact, cholesterol is completely normal. Every human body contains cholesterol. It is a substance manufactured by the liver. Its function is involved with the movement of fatty material from the liver to other organs and parts of the body, and back.
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.
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.
Acting alone, a single one of the factors mentioned above might not be deadly. When they work in conjunction however, they form a lethal mix that results in the death of more people in America than anything else. Cholesterol is also one of the major causes of death world wide.
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