Cholesterol Health

Cholesterol has long been a nutritional bad guy, but it plays an important role in our overall health. The soft, waxy substance is found not only in your bloodstream, but also in every cell in your body, where it helps to produce cell membranes, hormones, vitamin D, and bile acids that help you digest fat. Cholesterol is also vital for neurological function. With all of the conflicting information surrounding cholesterol, we thought it was time to sit down with the specialists at Total Nutrition and Therapeutics to find out more.

So cholesterol is the building block. It's the precursor hormone to all your sex hormones. Progesterone, testosterone, estrogen. It's important in digestion of fats in the body. It's absolutely important in vitamin D production. So we need cholesterol. The problem is that we don't need too much, and we certainly need enough to be that precursor hormone. So how do we control that? How do we have the right numbers? And is that really important when it comes to heart disease? Because we know now that 50% of heart attacks are in people that don't have high cholesterol. The relationship between coronary artery disease and cholesterol is inflammation. If we can empower individuals to improve their inflammatory state, lowering inflammatory markers by changing their diet, changing lifestyle, we can reduce the risk of heart disease. But they need to be able to lower their sugar intake. They need to be able to exercise, they need to control their insulin levels, they need to sleep better. But again, that relationship is not ingesting too much cholesterol. The relationship between coronary artery disease and cholesterol is inflammation. We've got to correct the inflammation. So again, is the relationship between cholesterol and coronary artery disease? Is that it? Is that all we're looking at? No, that's not all we're looking at. We need to look bigger than that. We need to look at inflammation. We need to look at, are there some underlying low grade infections going on? Are there some food allergens that people are ingesting that they may not even know? And what's our sugar intake? Because I think that's the biggest thing that we as Americans do completely wrong. We eat way too many carbohydrates, way too much sugar. That's what we need to be fixing.

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