| What is Cholesterol? |
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| Written by David Delaney |
| Monday, 05 October 2009 08:00 |
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What is cholesterol? Cholesterol is a fact, or lipid. It is also a sterile, from which steroid hormones are made. If you held cholesterol in your hand, you would see a waxy substance that resembles the very fine scrapings of a whitish yellow candle. Cholesterol flows through your body via your bloodstream, but this is not a simple process. Because liquids are oil-based and blood is water-based, they don't mix. If cholesterol were simply dumped into your bloodstream, it would congeal into unusable globs. To get around this problem, the body package is cholesterol and other fats into minuscule proteins and covered particles called lipoproteins that do makes easily with blood. The proteins used are known as apolipoproteins. The fat of these particles is made up of cholesterol and triglycerides and a third material I won't discuss much, phospholipid, which helps make the whole particles stick together. Triglycerides are particle type of fat that have three fatty acids attached to an alcohol called glycerol - hence the name. They compose about 90% of the fat in the food you eat. The body needs triglycerides for energy, but as with cholesterol, too much is bad for the arteries in the heart. Cholesterol is so important to the body that it makes it its self, mother nature doesn't have to leave it up to humans to get whatever they need from diet alone. So even if you ate a completely cholesterol free diet, your body would make the approximately thousand milligrams it needs to function properly. Your body has the ability to regulate the amount of cholesterol in the blood, producing more when your diet doesn't provide adequate amounts. The regulation of cholesterol synthesis is an elegant process that is tightly controlled.
Excerpt from: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Lowering Your Cholesterol |
