daft question..... Cholesterol..... does the body only produce bad or good Cholesterol?

[foxyrobyn]

Hi,

i was wandering what sort of cholesterol the body produces. As i had a thought today , if you have high bad Cholestorol... isnt that caused by the intake of food, that if you had family based high cholestorol, wouldnt it be high good cholesterol??..... isnt high bad cholesterol a sign of bad diet or an inability for the body to process bad chol...???

[Penel]

Cholesterol is made by your body and it is vital part of how your body works. Most of our cholesterol is made in the liver, only a little comes from the food we eat.

livestrong.com/article/3861...

If you look up the science of what cholesterol is and how it works, you will see that it is very complicated. One of the things that cholesterol does is to repair damage to the walls of our blood vessels. The damage to our blood vessels appears to be caused by food high in sugar and flour, which also increases our 'bad' cholesterol.

[Aliwally]

Everything about cholesterol seems so complicated sometimes! You don't have a cholesterol level in the blood, the cholesterol is carried in lipoproteins of which there are 4 types. HDL is considered "good" because it takes excess back to the liver.

People with FH have high levels because the liver lacks the receptors to take the cholesterol back in. I don't know if you read Dr Malcolm Kendrick, but chapter 3 of "The Great cholesterol Con" has a really readable chapter on lipoproteins.

He makes the point that HDL contains more cholesterol pound for pound than LDL!

[YvonneD]

As a lay person, my understanding of this is:

1. Every cell in our body needs cholesterol so our body produces it and circulates it around our body - to do good.

2. When the "goodness" has been used up, it takes the residue back to to the source to be eliminated from the body.

3. If you have inherited hypercholesterolaemia then, instead of having the equivalent of ten fingers to pull this bad cholesterol out, maybe you only have nine, or six or two, so you let some of the "bad" cholesterol recirculate - and this causes the problems. More "fingers" = higher the HDL and lower the LDL in the blood stream. Fewer fingers = more severe the condition and more problems.

May I suggest that you attend the Patients Day at the HEART UK conference in Bristol in July - all your questions can be answered there by experts in this field.

[foodblog]

Being a layperson with raised cholesterol I looked into this very question which is, as Aliwally points out, very complex. I have written about the understanding I reached about what cholesterol is for in the body, the good the bad and the ugly, in my blog which you can find at fromtheheatlhyheart.com. The information you are asking about is on Day 20, 21 and 23 in the Diary section. Let me know if you can't find these pages and I will send you the links.

[foxyrobyn]

Hi, the web address doesnt exit according to Virgin media :s

[stopgo]

There is no such thing as a Daft question only a daft answer. Research all answers before making a decision.