What is Cholesterol? Understanding its Nature!
If you’re like me and have really high cholesterol, you’ve probably asked yourself a number of questions such as; “How do I lower it? What are the risks of high cholesterol? And what is cholesterol anyway??” Most people focus their attention on ways of lowering cholesterol without ever really knowing what cholesterol is. While you certainly don’t need to know, being able to answer the question ‘what is cholesterol?’ may at least give you some better insights on why its important to keep it low, and how. If not, it may at least help prepare you for a spot on Jeopardy.
From the organic chemistry point of view, cholesterol is an aerobic chemical compound, sounds complex doesn’t it? Well to continue, it is also hydrophobic in nature (doesn’t like water). And, so? You might be asking. Perhaps a better way of putting it would be to explain how cholesterol works in the body.
Perhaps a better way to answer the question is to look at what cholesterol does to the body. Cholesterol does serve a purpose in the body, it is not all bad in nature. Cholesterol provides the membranes of cells with a flexible, fluid quality in animals. Unlike the cells of plants which are inflexible, animal cells have to bend and flex without breaking. Cells in animals (of which we humans are), have membranes that consist of a double layer of lipids. Each lipid cell layer has a hydrophilic head and tail. The hydrophilic head aligns with the watery interior and exterior of the cell, and the tail aligns in the centre of the cell which is relatively free of water. Cholesterol likes to be in the centre of the double layer of lipids in the cell membrane, and its molecules are small enough to flow freely here. This flow of cholesterol molecules is what allows the cell membrane to remain elastic and flexible.
The conclusion we get from this is that cholesterol is vital to life. Now this is where the good and the bad comes in. Cholesterol cannot make its own way around the body, it has to be carried by lipoprotein carriers, there are many of these but the most significant are HDL and LDL. It is LDL levels that tell us when we have too much bad cholesterol on the body and we need to lower these levels before they become dangerous. LDL is the artery clogging cholesterol.
In terms of “what is cholesterol” it is not actually the cholesterol that is the risk factor it is the LDL. Cholesterol is an essential building block in the body; it is produced by the liver and is responsible for the manufacture of various hormones. The liver is able to produce all the cholesterol our bodies will ever need. Therefore you can never ever eat too little cholesterol as we don’t actually need to eat it for our body to produce it. So now you know the answer to the question “what is cholesterol?
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