Cholesterol - Does It Spell Doom Or Is It Even Remotely Useful To The Human Body?

Our blood cholesterol levels tend to bring us doom and gloom as we age — worse still when we don’t understand the fundamental mechanisms behind its operation!

Cholesterol is one of those words that people dread discussing as they grow older. Beyond the obvious implications of heart attacks or strokes, the whole issue behind that C word starts at the doctor’s office.

All we need is one blood test to show an elevated low density lipoprotein (LDL) concentration in our blood to set off that long conversation with a healthcare professional in motion.

The problem being that there’s so much fear in multiple different arenas:

1. The physical health aspect, where people may end up being permanently incapacitated by a stroke or a heart attack.

2. The financial aspect, because healthcare bills don’t come cheap in some countries around the world (and neither do recurring drug prescriptions, for that matter).

3. The psychological aspect, because it can be quite stressful just thinking about “what if I do get a heart attack”, “what’s going to happen” and so on.

It’s terribly limiting to what we can do with the rest of our lives, especially if we’re thinking about high blood cholesterol levels that can potentially lead into a stroke/heart attack, and we’d tend to tone down intense activities significantly.

Of course, the issue being that most people are only familiar with surface-level knowledge, which further complicates the issue.

What is LDL, for instance?

What is high density lipoprotein (HDL)?

How does all that combine together to force a heart attack or a stroke?

The mechanism is just too darned complex, unfortunately.

But what we do know is that cholesterol is this fat (or oil)-like substance that is a necessary building block for cell membranes in our body. All cells in our body contain membranes, which all do require cholesterol for synthesis.

But as we have seen in the kitchen countless times, oil and water do not mix. We see that in salad dressings too. The oil and water can separate out over time, where the oil ends up floating on top of the water because it has a lower density than water.

In the same way, we cannot expect that the freshly synthesised cholesterol (fat) coming out of the liver can make its way into the blood (water) to the cell without any protective transporter carrier — hence the lipoprotein exists.

Much like a school bag that contains the necessary books and files that a student needs to bring to school, the lipoprotein functions like a carrier bag that the cholesterol molecules are placed in.

In that way, they can enter the blood, and the lipoprotein transports them to various cells for repairing damaged cell membranes and for the synthesis of new cells.

When the lipoprotein is packed full of cholesterol molecules, its density decreases (because oil floats on water, remember?).