My mother just had double bypass surgery due to a blockage in one of her arteries and so I have been learning a lot this week. One item that I found particularly interesting dealt with the link between saturated fats and cholesterol.
It's funny but there is so much talk about cholesterol and saturated fats it wasn't until this that I realized I really had no clue what the connection if any there was between the two.
We have to start by first looking at how cholesterol is created and used in the body.
Our livers produce cholesterol and it is something we never need to bring into our bodies from an outside source. Our livers will produce all the cholesterol we need. Now that doesn't mean that any cholesterol we consume is overkill, but it does mean that we don't need to bring any cholesterol in from an outside source. Luckily our livers are smart enough to know how much it needs to produce based on how much our body is bringing in. Where we run into trouble with what we bring in to our bodies is that we may bring in much more cholesterol than is needed for use by our body. Where our livers are smart enough to reduce their production of cholesterol it is very easy for us to overdue the amount of cholesterol our body needs. The rule of thumb then is to avoid bringing any cholesterol in to our bodies and let the liver handle the production.
Now how does cholesterol build up in the blood stream. Well cholesterol is transported via the blood stream through the body for cells to use as needed. When we consume too much cholesterol, we get more in the blood stream than the body can use and so we get a build up of cholesterol in the blood stream.
Now that we understand this we can better understand why saturated fats are bad. Saturated fats trigger the liver to overproduce cholesterol. So even if you aren't eating any foods that contain cholesterol, if you are eating foods that contain a lot of saturated fat then you will get an overproduction of cholesterol and as we've learned that is a bad thing.
I'll follow up later with an entry about foods to avoid.
