What You Need To Know About Cholesterol
Posted on 04. Nov, 2009 by Haman Oakley in Diet & Nutrition
A lot of people is under the impression that cholesterol is something that does not occur in a normal body. That it’s caused by extraneous factors, and if you could get rid of those factors, you will no longer have any cholesterol in your body.
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.
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.
One of the major causes of dangerous cholesterol levels is simply eating too much, specifically eating too much fatty food. In our time we don’t normally get the same amount of exercise as our forefathers, therefore the body has now other way to copy with all this fat than to store it somewhere. This causes a buildup of LDL cholesterol in the bloodstream, which eventually causes something called plaque. This is similar to the plaque on teeth, but not the same. It can become brittle, break off and clog your arteries.
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.
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.
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