Your blood cholesterol level has a lot to do with your chances of getting heart disease. High blood cholesterol is one of the major risk factors for heart disease. A risk factor is a condition that increases your chance of getting a disease. In fact, the higher your blood cholesterol level, the greater your risk for developing heart disease or having a heart attack. Heart disease is the number one killer of women and men in the United States. Each year, more than a million Americans have heart attacks, and about a half million people die from heart disease.
Cholesterol is a waxy, fatlike substance that your body needs to function normally. Cholesterol is naturally present in cell walls or membranes everywhere in the body, including the brain, nerves, muscles, skin, liver, intestines, and heart.
How Does Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease?
Your body uses cholesterol to produce many hormones, vitamin D, and the bile acids that help to digest fat. It takes only a small amount of cholesterol in the blood to meet these needs. When there is too much cholesterol (a fat-like substance) in your blood, it builds up in the walls of your arteries. Over time, this buildup causes “hardening of the arteries” so that arteries become narrowed and blood flow to the heart is slowed down or blocked. The blood carries oxygen to the heart, and if enough blood and oxygen cannot reach your heart, you may suffer chest pain. If the blood supply to a portion of the heart is completely cut off by a blockage, the result is a heart attack.
High blood cholesterol itself does not cause symptoms, so many people are unaware that their cholesterol level is too high. It is important to find out what your cholesterol numbers are because lowering cholesterol levels that are too high lessens the risk for developing heart disease and reduces the chance of a heart attack or dying of heart disease, even if you already have it. Cholesterol lowering is important for everyone – younger, middle age, and older adults; women and men; and people with or without heart disease.
A simple blood test checks for high cholesterol. Simply knowing your total cholesterol level is not enough. A complete lipid profile measures your LDL (low-density lipoprotein [the bad cholesterol]), total cholesterol, HDL (high-density lipoprotein [the good cholesterol]), and triglycerides—another fatty substance in the blood. Government guidelines say healthy adults should have this analysis every 5 years.
What is Cholesterol and why it is important to us? What do our bodies do with it?
Cholesterol is a fatlike waxy substance and is produced by the liver. Cholesterol is found in the brain, nerves, blood, bile and liver. It is the stuff from which your steroid hormones are made, and it is essential for good brain function. Cholesterol is important to overall health and body function.
Cholesterol forms every cell within the body. When the cholesterol level is appropriate, it plays a life-giving role in many functions of the body. When cholesterol is at a good level it works to build and repair cells, produces hormones such as estrogen and testosterone, and produces bile acids which are proven to aid in the digestion of fat.
Another function of cholesterol is to stick to damaged places in the arteries as part of a repair process. Arteries that were damaged from factors such as excess sugar and refined carbohydrates in the diet, hydrogenated oils, obesity, stress and toxins. Arteries that have become inflamed and are crying out to the repairmen (new cells made from cholesterol), to fix the damage and keep you alive. So in trying to save you from leaky arteries, cholesterol builds up along the artery walls and creates plaque. This is why cholesterol has gotten to be a bad word and is associated with heart disease.
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