Reduce Your High Cholesterol Now!

According to the National Health service, cholesterol is actually an important part of a fit and healthy body. It’s a building block for steroids like the sex hormones, and the hormones of the adrenal cortex(don’t ask!). It is also the basis of the body’s production of bile salts.

Now, If you’re anything like me, you’ve got some seriously high cholesterol and that’s not good. It can be a quite frightening when your doctor takes one look at your blood work lab results and huffs a sigh of despondency. I must remember to have a little chat with my doctor about keeping a good poker face. I think he’s fresh out of medical college, and is still working on his patient approach, but anyway, that’s all beside the point. The point is, high cholesterol is a very serious matter, and really increases your chances of developing heart disease and/or having a stroke.

So why is having high cholesterol so serious? Okay, here comes a bit more scientific explanation, so bear with me. Cholesterol is a chemical compound present in high amounts in animal cell membranes. It helps to keep the membranes of your cells ‘fluid’, which is important for reasons that are too complicated for the scope of this discussion. Because it can slip into and out of cell membranes, it also acts as a sort of transport molecule. By attaching to proteins and other molecules that normally would be unable to pass through a cell membrane, cholesterol allows these compounds to enter the cell. Additionally, it is a vital component part to more complicated proteins and enzymes, including steroid hormones.

That all makes cholesterol sound pretty good, and it actually is as pointed out in the introduction. Without it, we would not be able to live. Sadly, cholesterol has one little nasty problem associated with it. It has a tendency to get trapped in blood vessels and here lies the problem. When it gets stuck in blood vessels, other cholesterol molecules get stuck to the first ones, so on and so forth until the blood is completely blocked. A blocked blood vessel in most parts of the body is not really a big deal, and happens all the time. However, a blocked vessel in a crucial part of the heart or brain is more serious and can lead to heart attacks and strokes, respectively. Having high cholesterol increases the chances of these events occurring.

So what can you do about high cholesterol? First of all, see a doctor. Many types of high cholesterol can be reduced to safe cholesterol levels just by committing to a bit of regular exercise and the proper diet for high cholesterol . Though it was long thought that high cholesterol was caused first and foremost by an inadequate diet, it is now known to have strong genetic components. More serious forms of high cholesterol may need to be treated with medication. Only your doctor can help you to determine if you should consider taking such a medication.

Article by Andy Maingam