"CHOLESTEROL ISN’T ALL BAD" Below information is from the copy of mail online.
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"According to Dr Harding, whose research focuses on dietary fats and their link with heart disease: ‘Cholesterol gets a really bad name, but it’s absolutely essential for us to survive.’
Indeed, cholesterol is a fatty substance we get from animal products — but our bodies can also make it if needed. We use cholesterol to produce certain hormones, the membranes that protect our cells and also to make bile, which helps digestion.
‘This means your body is constantly trying to balance its levels of cholesterol, depending on how much is coming in,’ explains Dr Harding. ‘A healthy person has no problem tightly regulating their cholesterol at a certain level.’
It’s when something goes wrong with this regulation process that problems show up in the form of raised cholesterol in the blood.
‘The tissues push excess cholesterol into the blood when they’ve got enough, so other parts of the body can use it,’ says Dr Harding.
‘But if they don’t need it either, it stays parcelled up in particles called low-density lipoproteins [that’s the ‘bad’ LDL].
‘This is the last resort place to store cholesterol. But blood vessels are not designed for that, and so it starts to cause damage, which is why it’s associated with heart disease.’
Yet it’s not as simple as saying that too much dietary cholesterol, such as that found in eggs, goes straight to the bad stores in our blood. Professor Sanders points out that LDL cholesterol is typically marginally lower in vegans, who consume no cholesterol, so although dietary cholesterol does seem to have some effect on blood levels, it’s far from the only factor.
As Dr Harding explains: ‘Think of your cholesterol system like a big warehouse: you’ve got stuff you’ve shipped in and stuff you’ve made on site, but ultimately everything gets redistributed from the same place — and it’s that redistribution process that’s messed up in people with raised cholesterol.’As for what exactly triggers the processing problem, there are many possible explanations. For example, too much saturated fat changes the way the liver processes cholesterol, meaning LDL cholesterol isn’t taken out of the blood and broken down as easily. Raised cholesterol levels are also associated with getting older.
‘But we don’t yet know if that’s because something naturally goes wrong with cholesterol metabolism as we age, or if it’s the cumulative result of 25 years of an unhealthy lifestyle,’ says Dr Harding."
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