What effect does each type of cholesterol have on health?

Answer 1

High cholesterol is a serious health problem that affects about fifty million Americans. It's a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD), which half of all men and a third of all women will get at some time in their lives. I'll spend the majority of this book on the two things my patients ask about most: how cholesterol and Heart disease are connected and what they can do to optimize their cholesterol levels. But I want to take a few pages early on to clarify that cholesterol in and of itself isn't bad. While too much cholesterol can be harmful, just the right amount of it does a lot of important work in the body. But like carbohydrates in recent years, cholesterol has gotten such a bad rap that most people don't know the good it does.

Cholesterol performs three main functions:

1. It helps make the outer coating of cells.
2. It makes up the bile acids that work to digest food in the intestine.
3. It allows the body to make Vitamin D and hormones, like estrogen in women and testosterone in men.