Cholesterol

A lot of people ask me about cholesterol. I know it’s becoming a big health concern with more young people starting to develop it. Unfortunately it does run in families (including mine) and your risk increases as you get older. So what’s the big deal about cholesterol? Well cholesterol travels around in our blood in little molecules, so the more cholesterol you have the more likely it is to build up and block arteries etc. Sounds pretty serious right? Well it is; a severely blocked artery could lead to a heart attack or stroke. There are other processes that go on with this, which end up in a vicious cycle of inflammation and stress in the blood vessels. How is cholesterol accumulated? The majority of cholesterol found floating around in your blood, funnily enough, doesn’t actually come from cholesterol we eat. Our body has the ability to make cholesterol whether we consume it or not. Don’t get me wrong; we need cholesterol in our bodies, but there are different types. The two main types are HDL and LDL. The way I remember them is H stands for Hero, so it’s the good cholesterol while L stands for Loser, the bad cholesterol (sophisticated I know). Most of our LDL (or Loser) cholesterol is made from saturated fat which is found in animal products such as meat, full fat milk and milk products and also some non-animal products like coconut and palm oil. For-tuna-tely we can increase our HDL cholesterol by consuming good sources of fat such as tuna and all fish, nuts, avocados and olives. We can also improve our HDL to LDL ratio by exercising.

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