Worried about cholesterol? – Diet and Health Today

Introduction

During the recent update of our zoeharcombe.com web site we reviewed the hundreds of articles to assign them the best category and tag matches for optimal searching. I also chose my favourite articles for the nine ‘super categories’ that we created. One of the super categories is “Cholesterol & Statins.” This is probably the top super category. Whenever I do an article on this topic, I receive more comments and replies than on any other subject.

One of the most important posts in the Cholesterol & Statins category was written over 10 years ago. It was called “Worried about cholesterol and/or statins” (Ref 1). It’s time for this to be updated. This topic and the number of posts that I’ve written on it have grown so much that this is the first of two notes. This one is “Worried about cholesterol?” and next week’s will be how to deal with “Pressure to take statins.”

This is a signpost article that will refer you to other articles, which go into greater detail about that point. It covers the following:

– Some basics about cholesterol.

– Conversions between mmol/L and mg/dL.

– Cholesterol targets in the UK & US.

– Do you have high cholesterol?

– What if your cholesterol is above 10 mmol/L (387 mg/dL)?

– Is the cholesterol test accurate?

– Why cholesterol can’t cause heart disease (covering saturated fat and cholesterol, saturated fat and heart disease and cholesterol and heart disease).

– Cardiovascular disease (CVD) calculators and cholesterol as a risk factor.

Some basics about cholesterol

1) It is virtually impossible to explain how vital cholesterol is to the human body. If you had no cholesterol in your body you would be dead. No cells, no bone structure, no muscles, no hormones, no sex, no reproductive system, no digestion, no brain function, no memory, no nerve endings, no movement, no human life – nothing without cholesterol. It is utterly vital and we die instantly without it.

2) Cholesterol is so vital that our bodies make it. The body cannot risk leaving it to chance that we would get it from food or some other external factor – that’s how critical it is.

3) There is no such thing as good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. Cholesterol is cholesterol. The chemical formula for cholesterol is C27H46O. There is no good version or bad version of this formula. HDL is not even cholesterol, let alone good. LDL is not even cholesterol, let alone bad. HDL stands for High Density Lipoprotein. LDL stands for Low Density Lipoprotein. (The main three other lipoproteins are chylomicrons, Very Low Density Lipoproteins (VLDL) and Intermediate Density Lipoproteins (IDL)).

Fat and cholesterol are not water soluble and so they need to be carried around the body in something to do their vital work. The carriers of such substances are called lipoproteins. We can think of lipoproteins as tiny ‘taxi cabs’ travelling round the blood stream acting as transporters. So, lipoproteins are carriers of cholesterol – oh – and triglyceride and phospholipids and protein. All lipoproteins carry all of these substances – just in different proportions. LDL would more accurately be called the carrier of fresh cholesterol and HDL would more accurately be called the carrier of recycled cholesterol.