Cholesterol Reviewer

For some reasons cholesterol has been general health concern for many years, but scientists are just beginning to learn about the so called good and bad cholesterol. In reality, it seems it is almost as important to improve your good cholesterol as it is to decrease the level of your bad cholesterol.

To understand the importantance of the necessity to raise your good cholesterol, you must first understand its function. Ad when you understand how important this good cholesterol is for your health being, you may want to learn some tried-and-true ways to raise your levels of good cholesterol.

This Cholesterol Can Provoke Heart Disease

To start with, good cholesterol’s official name is high density lipoprotein or HDL cholesterol. Second, cholesterol as a substance in itself is neither good nor bad; it crucially depends on which type carrier the cholesterol happens to be. With high density lipoprotein cholesterol, this cholesterol is washed away from the heart and arteries to the liver where the cholesterol is disintegrated and excreted from the body.

Let’s talk about our body’s “enemy”- bad cholesterol. This is the type of cholesterol that builds up in your arteries and can provoke heart disease or heart attack. Some scientists believe the HDL cholesterol not only washes cholesterol away from your heart, but may help remove bad cholesterol out of your arteries.

Ideally, you should try to increase the level of your good cholesterol if you want to have a healthy heart and arteries. Healthy ratio of HDL cholesterol level is considered to be 60 mg/dl or more. If you will be able to get this level of 60 mg/dl or above, doctors believe you can offset other causes that put you at risk for heart disease. As we said - 60 mg/dl is a good level to aim for, but our advice is that you have at least 30 mg/dl or above if you are a woman or 40 mg/dl or above if you are a man.

Your Way to HDL Cholesterol Level Improvement

Let us suppose that your HDL cholesterol level is not as high as you would want it to be – then you are in luck, there are some proven steps you can take to increase your good cholesterol level. These include getting more physical exercise or aerobic exercise – to be more particular – it includes walking, jogging, swimming and bike riding. Losing weight is an essential element in the attempt to increase your levels of good cholesterol.

We strictly advise you to quit smoking and severely cut trans-fatty acids out of your diet. These trans-fatty acids are found in pre-packaged foods and fried fast foods. Sounds strange but another way to improve your HDL cholesterol level is to have a drink or two each day. But please be advised that too much of alcohol can be bad for your heart, doctors have found that 1-2 drinks a day can raise your HDL cholesterol. Diet rich with soluble fiber can also help to raise your good cholesterol. If you have a high level of bad cholesterol then you may want to consult your doctor about taking cholesterol lowering medications also.

Be patient, the results won’t be quick as a lightning - it takes time to raise your good cholesterol level, but the outcome is worth the work. The more points you raise your good cholesterol, the less is your risk of heart disease by 2-3 percent. If you will be able to raise your HDL cholesterol by 10-12 points, you can lower your risk of heart disease by 50 percent.

If you know the patient’s cholesterol level, it is advisable to consider the results in terms of the cholesterol ratio along with the total amount of cholesterol found in the blood. This is to be done because the different elements play very various roles in the formation and creation of cholesterol in the arteries. Understanding of the basics of their concentrations relative to one another and to the total cholesterol present can provide a more precise indication of a patient’s risk of developing heart associated problems.

What are cholesterol numbers and ratio?

General blood cholesterol tests are able to recognize and measure the concentrations of three different types of cholesterol in the blood, namely:: LDL? (low density lipoprotein cholesterol), HDLC (high density lipoprotein cholesterol), and VLDLC (very low density lipoprotein cholesterol).

Measurement value of their levels is estimated in milligrams/deciliter and the concentration of each of these determines the corresponding cholesterol numbers, and the total is equal to the sum of all three types. Test results are often presented in terms of a total cholesterol number and a cholesterol ratio representing either Total/HDLC or LDLC/HDLC.

Let’s see in details the types of cholesterols. Low-density LDL cholesterol, also known among people as “bad” cholesterol, is strongly linked to the development of cardiovascular disease. Raised levels of both LDLC and VLDLC in the blood may serve as a reason for a buildup of plaque along artery walls, and consequently causing them over time to narrow and harden (this disease is called atherosclerosis).

On the other hand, the higher-density HDL cholesterol fights against their “brothers” in the following manner: it picks up excess LDLC and VLDLC that have accumulated both in the blood and along arterial walls. That’s why folks call it “good” cholesterol and it is no wonder that it is one of the cholesterol numbers we’d like to keep as high as possible. With high HDL?, your Total/HDL? and LDL?/HDL? cholesterol ratios will remain as low as possible, and this all will significantly lower the risk of the development of coronary heart disease.

How to preserve healthy cholesterol levels?

For the sake of better understanding of the cholesterol profile results and maintain healthy cholesterol levels, physicians have developed guidelines for cholesterol numbers.

For total cholesterol, the numbers less than 200 mg/dl is optimal, and the total level should not raise upper than 240 mg/dl in order to avoid the risk of various heart diseases. For LDLC, less than 100 mg/dl is good, and the total level should be kept below 160 mg/dl.

And finally, an optimal HDL cholesterol level value is set above 60 mg/dl, and should be sustained above 40 mg/dl for men and above 50 mg/dl for women to avoid excessive LDLC accumulation in the blood and along the artery walls.

These figures can be used as a guideline to determine healthy cholesterol ratios as well. Let’s see: patient who has total cholesterol number 200, LDLC number 100, and HDLC number 60 has a Total/HDL cholesterol ratio of 200/60 and an LDLC/HDLC ratio of 100/60. This allows to identify an optimal Total/HDLC ratio of about 3.3:1 and an optimal LDLC/HDLC ratio of about 1.7:1.

It is extremely important to maintain and preserve healthy cholesterol levels in order to lower your risk of cardiovascular disease and avoid many problems associated with it in future. This means that you should have your cholesterol level checked on the regular basis to see where you stand. In the long run, your health depends on it!

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Zetia, recognized by the generic ezetimibe, is a medicinal drug that assists decrease cholesterol soaked up by the body. Zetia is a good supplement suggested for use even when associated with a healthy diet or even when diet and physical exercise aren’t sufficient.

To avoid certain problems you must take a cholesterol test. As high cholesterol levels can be dangerous to your life, and coronary heart disease happens quite often when you have excess of bad cholesterol you should get a cholesterol test regularly.

Cholesterol results can be obtained with the help of blood test that will tell you the levels of both types of cholesterol in your organism. Such a test can be done at the hospital. Also, you can use home test kits for cholesterol testing. However, tests done in the hospital are more precise.

Should you have an excess of bad cholesterol, your doctor can advise you on how to lower it. He may request you to change your diet and do more exercise as well as prescribe you with cholesterol lowering medication. Most physicians’ advice that a person over the age of 20 should take a cholesterol test once every five years.

The Cholesterol Test Kit

Today there exists an option to undergo test on your cholesterol levels without having to leave your home. Such a kit can be obtained from any drug store and consists of the components required to conduct an accurate cholesterol test. Couple of blood drops will be enough to tell the cholesterol levels present in your body in ten minutes time. These tends are proved to have a 97% accuracy rate and is very easy. The approximate cost of the home cholesterol test kit is about $25 for a pack of two test kits. But please mind that home cholesterol test kit may not always be accurate.

You know that nowadays we can buy all kinds of home kits for many medical problems, but some of the results from the tests carried out by these kits may not be very accurate. However, inaccuracy in results may not lie with the test kit itself, but it may lie in the way it has been applied.

That is the very reason why doctors do not like take into consideration results of home cholesterol test. If your aim is to lower high cholesterol level, your doctor will ask you to take another test from the hospital lab. We are pretty sure that the doctor will only proceed with treatment after they get the lab tests results.

These kits may be useful if your doctor will approve its application. All this has one aim – when the test is done, he can interpret the results for you. This is why it is more preferable to take a lab test rather than simply using a home cholesterol test.

Every home cholesterol test done with a home test kit should be repeated in the hospital for double confirmation, so that if your home test results are wrong, you will know it before you undergo any form of cholesterol lowering treatment.

Taking into account certain result’s fluctuations while using home cholesterol test kit, you should consult your doctor and have the test re-done before taking any form of drugs or medications.

Cholesterol is quite a new term but nowadays it is well known and sensitive persons are frightened by it. Struggle for the universal decholesterolization has begun approximately in the 1980s. At the same time a so-called “fashion” has appeared to calculate quantity of the cholesterol eaten with products practically with the calculator in hands.

Sometimes they say about “good” and “bad” cholesterol but not all its variations are dangerous. It is homogeneous as a substance but found in blood in different compounds with other fatty matters and proteic substance which are called lipoproteins. One of them is low-density lipoproteins which carry cholesterol with blood to peripheral organs from liver where they are synthesized. If these compounds are overproduced or its disintegration is disrupted then large quantity of cholesterol is accumulated in blood. And in this case LDL cholesterol can be called as “bad” one.

The fact is that the excess of cholesterol finds its way into vessels’ walls. Here it is accumulated and conjunctive tissue proliferates around its deposition. So atherosclerosis plaque which narrows the lumen of a vessel and blocks blood flow is formed.

There are different kinds of atherosclerosis plaques. The most dangerous are malignant plaques with a big cholesterol nucleus and a cap adjusted to it with the help of connective tissue. Such a cap is easily torn and the plaque drains like abscess in the lumen of the blood vessel. In response to it organism tries to patch the damaged place by a thrombus. Very often such a thrombus cannot stop its growth and bocks up the lumen of the vessel as a cork. Blood flow is stopped and body tissues die off without oxygen and nutrients. If it happens in heart - it causes myocardial infarction and if it occurs in brain - it causes cerebral stroke. The onset of such dangerous diseases is evoked by high level of cholesterol which is found in “bad” LDL cholesterol.

There exist another viewpoint on the problem of low-density lipoproteins; a number of specialists question the idea that there is a certain connection between high-density lipoproteins and large number of cardiovascular diseases. They consider that people are frightened by slogans which boggle imagination: “killer of arteries”, “horror of the century”, “social danger number one”. That is, attribution of all of these characteristics to cholesterol makes doctors more and more doubtful about it. They refer to the fact that for more than twenty years of the fight against cholesterol doctors failed to reduce sickness rate from atherosclerosis and death rate from cardiovascular diseases.

Very often specialists mention so-called “French paradox”. It’s about the fact that the French have low rate of cardiovascular diseases despite that they traditionally consume food which is rich in cholesterol. And on the contrary, in the USA, where the majority of population has fallen for non-cholesterol diets, continue heading the list for the rate of atherosclerosis and number of obese people.

Despite the fact that many people nowadays take medicine which reduces the level of cholesterol in blood or follow the corresponding diet, the number of suffering from cardiovascular diseases does not decrease.

The question of cholesterol has been highly arguable for almost one hundred years. It is declared to be the main reason for the development of atherosclerosis that leads to stenocardia, heart attacks and apoplexies. Then the struggle with it begins. Not always successful, because our body gets the cholesterol not only from food but also generates it internally.

Also, it was found out that cholesterol is not always unhealthy and dangerous. There is “bad” cholesterol causing atherosclerosis and a “good” one preventing the organism from its development. At first it is required to do extra tests in order to determine its qualitative composition. Cholesterol itself is not a problem; the problem is the way it travels through the organism. Lipoproteins - complex compounds of fat and proteins are the carriers of cholesterol.

If the analysis shows that the number of low-density lipoproteins in the blood prevails - it’s time to worry, because exactly these compounds promote the sedimentation of cholesterol on vascular walls and the development of heart diseases. High-density lipoproteins on the contrary take part in removal of excess cholesterol. By the way, women suffer from heart attacks rarely than men exactly because their blood contains larger amount of the “good” cholesterol. This happens due to female hormones - estrogens. But when the menopause begins, chances of both men and women get equal.

In order to normalize the level of cholesterol in the blood it is necessary to:

-  Firstly, lower the caloric value of the diet. In case of overweight problems – you should lose weight. Very often loosing of weight is accompanied by normalization of cholesterol level;

-  Secondly, include beans, citrus fruits, apples and oatmeal in your diet. These products contain plant fibers, which help to remove excess of cholesterol. There is true popular wisdom: “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”. It is true, especially if it is strengthened by the habit of beginning the morning with the plate of oatmeal.

Beans also protect the organism from atherosclerosis. Low level of heart attacks and apoplexies registered among the Asian population - is the result of their devotion to the famous podded plant - soya. The researches of the American scientists have proved that soya protein removes “bad” cholesterol, i.e., lowers the level of low-density lipoproteins, not affecting the healthy high-density ones.

This fact doesn’t mean that you should overeat soya replacing it by other usual food products. 20-25 grams of soya proteins a day will suffice. In spite of common belief, tea and coffee don’t affect the concentration of fat in blood. And red wine in small portions has beneficial effect on vessels. Regular exercises of average-intensity are very important for the normalization of the right balance of “good” and “bad” cholesterol in blood. The results become evident after six months.

Non-cholesterol diet is not desirable for children too. There are several reasons for it. Cholesterol is a part of cell membranes and thus provides cell division that is especially important for the growing organism. It turns out that without cholesterol children simply won’t grow.