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What is Cholesterol?
Because of the propaganda over the past few decades, you can be forgiven for thinking that cholesterol is a harmful alien substance which must be avoided at all costs. But, nothing could be further from the truth. Cholesterol is arguably the most important compound in our bodies.
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Before we consider what cholesterol is, let us say what cholesterol is not: Cholesterol is not a fat; it isn't made from fat; it isn't even made from saturated fat. Cholesterol is an alcohol called a 'lipid alcohol'.
Cholesterol is an essential component in our bodies with a wide range of uses:
- Body cells are being broken down and replaced all the time. Obvious examples are finger nails, hair and skin cells, but almost all body cells are replaced many times over during a person's life. Cholesterol is a major building block for this process.
- If you radically restrict your cholesterol intake to the point that there is not enough cholesterol to repair and build tissue, cell growth is disrupted.
- Cholesterol is vital to keep cell membranes throughout the body intact and permeable so that nutrients can pass into the cells, and waste products can leave them.
- Cholesterol is also found in the brain and nerve cells, where it is essential for nerve transmission and for brain function.
- Cholesterol is used to maintain normal hormone production including the sex hormones in both men and women.
- Cholesterol is crucial for the manufacture of the important anti-stress hormone, cortisol.
- Cholesterol is essential for the proper functioning of the immune system.
- Cholesterol is used, in conjunction with sun on the skin, to make Vitamin D3.
- Cholesterol is used to make bile acids, essential for proper digestion of fats and in ridding the body of waste products.
- Cholesterol is so important that practically every body cell has the ability to make it.
Now does cholesterol really seem such terrible stuff?
Eat as much cholesterol as you like
There is a limit to the amount of cholesterol your body can absorb each day from the foods you eat and, as your body needs several times that amount, it then makes up the difference. Although the major proportion is manufactured in the liver, almost all body cells can make cholesterol. For this reason, if you eat less cholesterol, your body will compensate by making more cholesterol; if you eat more cholesterol, your body will make less. And you can eat foods containing huge amounts of cholesterol without it having much effect on the amount of cholesterol in your blood. So it really doesn't matter how much cholesterol you eat.
It has taken over a quarter of a century for it to be realised that you can eat as much cholesterol as you like. Yet, despite the fact that we do know it, still the unsupported dogma goes on.
That's all very well, it might be better to play safe, you might think, and not eat a lot anyway. But such thinking is wrong. The liver is the organ which synthesises most of the body's day-to-day cholesterol needs. That task is very complex and difficult, and the liver has lots of other jobs to do. These days, it just about wears itself out converting fructose from the five portions of fruit and colas into glucose. So, if you do eat a lot of foods which contain cholesterol, you are definitely doing your liver a favour.
Last updated 1 December 2011
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