"I Have High Triglyceride Levels. What Should I Be Concerned About?"

What constitutes a triglyceride in the first place? Why is there a concern about “high triglycerides”?

The health problems that many people in developed first world nations happen to revolve mainly around how the heart and the brain function. Whether it’s heart disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, or cholesterol issues.

We may have politics to blame for that:

We may have our own ill-discipline to blame for that, too.

But what’s going to stop the healthcare side from coming up with newfangled tests and/or new parameters to tell us how unhealthy we really are?

It’s like flogging a dead dog even more, for sure.

We’ve examined the issue of cholesterol in relation to heart disease before:

And of course, there are other parameters such as triglycerides to discuss.

So what is a triglyceride?

As its name suggests, a triglyceride molecule is a molecule of glycerol (from where the name “glyceride” is derived from) that is chemically bonded to three fatty acid molecules (hence “tri”). These chemical bonds come in the form of ester linkages.

Esters are found naturally in fruits and vegetables, and some have been used for perfume production because of the pleasant scents that they can produce.

That’s also how soap is manufactured via the saponification reaction.

A triglyceride molecule is, therefore, a triple ester — and that is how the human body stores fat. The fatty acids that we use for energy generation aren’t stored as fatty acid but as a triglyceride, and the triglyceride has to be broken down to obtain the free fatty acid for energy generation within the cell.

Now, esters can be decomposed very easily. Strong bases such as sodium hydroxide can cause hydrolysis of the fatty esters on the surface of our skin, which results in that slippery, soapy feeling on our skin — and that is when those fats on our skin undergo saponification.

In our digestive system, lipase enzymes secreted by the pancreas are responsible for breaking down those ester bonds in the triglyceride molecules.

So what does it mean when we have high triglycerides?

It can mean quite a few things:

1. We may be consuming too many fats in our diet.

2. We may have a digestive issue that prevents our digestive system from breaking down fats appropriately.

3. We may have a metabolic issue that prevents us from using those molecules for energy generation appropriately — because what the liver needs are the free fatty acid, not the triglyceride.

And of course, as the Mayo Clinic puts it,

If you regularly eat more calories than you burn, particularly from high-carbohydrate foods, you may have high triglycerides (hypertriglyceridemia).

Ah well, carbohydrates. Pretty much the bane of our existence when consumed in overwhelming quantities, though we are drowning in their advertisements these days:

The extrapolated issue that I tend to disagree with is that high triglycerides are a cause for concern because they, like high cholesterol, can be linked to potentially fatal problems such as heart attacks or strokes.

A high triglyceride issue is a symptom of a body being unable to decompose those triglycerides and use them for energy. And it is common for obese people to have high levels of triglycerides, because, well…

If they could eliminate those fats from their body appropriately, they wouldn’t be suffering from obesity, would they?

And that brings us back to the fundamental mechanisms of the energy generation process in our body’s cells:

Definitely, a dietary reduction in carbohydrate consumption is necessary, as is an increased level of exercise.

The problem is that most people diagnosed with high triglycerides or high cholesterol don’t really want to change up their lifestyles accordingly — and that’s the real risk behind developing the heart attack or the stroke that they would want to avoid as far as possible!

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