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.
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.
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.
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.
Genetic factors can play a further detrimental role in the normal functioning of our cholesterol system. It has been shown that up to 70% of people has a genetic defect causing the normal balance of good and bad cholesterol in their bodies to become disturbed. The result is either too much LDL, or too little HDL, and in turn the body is not able to deal with excess fat in a normal way.
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 foods that lower cholesterol? Read other article at cholesterol diet
