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Title : Understanding Cholesterol
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Understanding Cholesterol

High cholesterol is a serious health problem that affects about fifty million Americans. It’s a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD), which half of all men and a third of all women will get at some time in their lives. While too much cholesterol can be harmful, just the right amount of it does a lot of important work in the body. But like carbohydrates in recent years, cholesterol has gotten such a bad rap that most people don’t know the good it does.

Cholesterol performs three main functions:

1.  It helps make the outer coating of cells.
2.  It makes up the bile acids that work to digest food in the intestine.
3.  It allows the body to make Vitamin D and hormones, like estrogen in women and testosterone in men.

Without cholesterol, none of these functions would take place, and without these functions, human beings wouldn’t exist.

What Is Cholesterol?

Cholesterol is a fat, or lipid. It is also a sterol, 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 lipids 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 packages cholesterol and other fats into minuscule protein-covered particles called lipoproteins (lipid + protein) that do mix easily with blood. The proteins used are known as apolipoproteins. The fat in these particles is made up of cholesterol and triglycerides and a third material, phospholipid, which helps make the whole particle stick together. Triglycerides are a particular type of fat that have three fatty acids attached to an alcohol called glycerol—hence the name. They compose about 90 percent 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 and the heart.

That is Understanding Cholesterol

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