We often believe that there’s a cure for every illness. In the modern society, our lives have been continuously controlled by the use of drugs. There are pills to mask our anxieties, help us sleep, raise our moods and kick start our sex lives. Pharmaceutical companies have become modern witches, they create all kinds of magic potions to wipe away our afflictions. One of the modern maladies that are often mentioned in the media is “high cholesterol levels”, which is a type of sickness that’s relatively new. It’s devised when people are finally able to measure the cholesterol level in human blood. This sickness has no discernible symptoms and we are told that it’s an adverse deviation. The high blood cholesterol levels continue to go down over the years. Forty years ago, the risk level for cholesterol was 240 and it continues to go down until 180 in some countries. Suddenly, there are millions of new high cholesterol level patients and they need to get medication for their conditions. This is equal to higher revenue for many drugs companies.
Cholesterol is actually not an evil thing and we can’t live without it. Cholesterol is an essential component in the membranes of our cells and it’s estimated that our body is constructed by 70 trillion cells and about 1 million cells die each second. We need cholesterol to replace those dead cells. That’s the reason why our blood is designed to deliver cholesterol throughout our body. There should be an ample supply of cholesterol to do other things, such as the production of bile and different kinds of hormones, such as cortisone, testosterone and estrogen. It also has a vital role in the production of various fat-soluble vitamins, such as vitamin A, D, E and K. Our brain also contains a high level of cholesterol and constitutes about half of the solid mass of our brain. Obviously, things may go really bad. Free radicals may oxidize cholesterol, turning it into a rancid substance that is deposited in the bloodstream. This condition may causes damages to our arterial wall, which is not an overall good situation.
Both HDL and LDL have the same benefits in our body and they are equally usable, however, we should make sure that we have more of the lighter LDL than they heavier HDL. We should be able to achieve this by adopting a perfectly sensible life style. We should make sure that our body carries an optimum level of cholesterol, because when it gets too high, bad things may actually happen in the long run and it’s not a good thing. Even if we have a near-zero cholesterol diet, our body won’t run out of its cholesterol supply and the liver is the primary location where cholesterol is manufactured inside our body, along with the intestines and the adrenal glands. In a normal situation, 80 percent of required cholesterol is already produced by our body and we need to have only a moderate amount of cholesterol from our food.
