Nutrition Science and Everyday Application - beta v 0.1

LIPID TRANSPORT, STORAGE, AND UTILIZATION 291
are good reasons to watch the type of fats that you eat, because of the relationship between
dietary fat intake and risk of developing cardiovascular disease.
UNDERSTANDING BLOOD CHOLESTEROL NUMBERS
A person’s blood cholesterol numbers can be one indicator of their risk of developing
cardiovascular disease. This is a standard blood test, also called a lipid panel, that reports
total cholesterol, LDL, HDL, and triglycerides. When doctors assess a person’s risk of
cardiovascular disease, they consider these numbers—along with other risk factors like
family history, smoking, diabetes, and high blood pressure—in determining their
recommendations for lifestyle changes (such as improving diet and getting more exercise)
or prescribing medications.
You might be familiar with LDL and HDL as “good cholesterol” and “bad cholesterol,”
respectively. This is an oversimplification to help people interpret their blood lipid values,
because cholesterol is cholesterol; it’s not good or bad. The cholesterol in your food or
synthesized in your body is all the same cholesterol molecule, and you can’t consume
good or bad cholesterol. In reality, LDL and HDL are both lipoproteins that carry
cholesterol. A more appropriate descriptor for LDL might be the “bad cholesterol
transporter.” We can think of HDL as the “good cholesterol transporter,” although the more
researchers learn about HDL, the more they realize that this is also an oversimplification.
What’s so bad about LDL? If there’s too much LDL in the blood, it can become lodged
in arterial walls and contribute to the development of atherosclerosis, when fatty plaques
thicken the walls of arteries and reduce the flow of blood (and therefore oxygen and
nutrients). Atherosclerosis can lead to a number of problems, including the following:
• coronary artery disease (can lead to angina and heart attack)
• carotid artery disease (increases risk of stroke)
• peripheral artery disease
• chronic kidney disease
If a broken piece of plaque or a blood clot completely blocks an artery supplying the
brain or the heart, it can cause a stroke or a heart attack, respectively. If you have high
LDL cholesterol, then making changes like exercising more, eating less saturated fat, and
stopping smoking (if applicable) can help lower it. Sometimes medications are also necessary
to keep LDL in check.