Cholesterol and Your Heart

Lower your Cholesterol For Your Heart

Having a lower cholesterol is very important to our overall health, no matterhow old we are or aren't. This is especiallytrue if we want to avoid having a heart attack or stroke.In order to understand what this means and how to achieve it, we all need tounderstand a few of the key concepts and terms first.Among the things that we need to know are cholesterol, HDL, LDL, lipoproteins,serum cholesterol, dietary cholesterol, saturated fats, atherosclerosis, andcoronary artery disease.

Cholesterol is basically just  afat-like substance that is found all through the body.Basically it gets there in one of two ways,either from the body itself or in the foods we eat and put into it.It is a very common, and very important worker bee in the body’s honey comb.Too much of it, however, is not healthy for the body.Too much of it can clog our arteries, block our hearts, and actually threatento end our lives. More often than not we needto lower cholesterol in our bodies.

There are two kinds of cholesterol that we have, which may be confusing at first.High density lipoprotein is one of them, and it is commonly known as HDL,sometimes it is also called the good cholesterol because it can protect theheart. Low density lipoproteins, which are commonlyknown as LDL, and are sometimes called the bad cholesterol because it can clogarteries and kill us, is the other. We haveboth kinds of cholesterol in our bodies and we them need both.The balance between them is critical to our body.It is what helps determine whether a heart is healthy or in dyer need ofcorrection.

The link between cholesterol and heart disease has been established innumerous studies. In Specific, the higher thecholesterol, the greater the risk is of us getting heart disease.It's really that simple. High cholesterol iscommon for most people. However the good newsis that we can do something about it. We all wantlower cholesterol. The hard thing though isthat most of us have a hard time to control this.