High Cholesterol affects roughly 42 million Americans and an additional 63 million have borderline high cholesterol. Why is it that 50% of the population suffers from this potentially fatal problem? Some doctors believe that people simply aren’t educated about good fats and bad fats, nor do they see a doctor to be specifically screened for cholesterol trouble.

The bad cholesterol you’ve probably heard so much about is called Low Density Lipoprotein. The good type goes bad when it stops transporting and oxidizes from exposure to free radicals, leading to conditions like atherosclerosis. If you have 160mg or more of LDL per day, then you have a high level of harmful cholesterol. By contrast, high density Lipoprotein (or HDL) is known as “good cholesterol.” It helps one-fourth to one-third of blood cholesterol to be carried from the arteries to the liver by HDL. Doctors recommend that you have more than 40mg of HDL to lower your risk of heart disease.

Calories are converted to triglycerides before your tissues can use them as energy. However, like cholesterol, your triglyceride levels can be excessive if you are overweight, a smoker, are inactive or consume a lot of alcohol. Usually people with high levels of triglycerides have high LDL and low HDL levels. You have high triglycerides if your levels are more than 200mg.

More On: Cholesterol And You

Technorati Tags: dieting, cholesterol, cholesterol and you

Quickly bookmark How Cholesterol Can Affect You at:                                                

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 8:02 pm and is filed under Health & Beauty. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.