Cholesterol Schmolesterol?

Common nutritional advice has told us that cholesterol is a health risk. But as research progresses and we learn more about its functions, it turns out that cholesterol is vital for a healthy body.

Cholesterol helps you absorb those vitamins you work so hard to include in your diet. It is also critical for every membrane of every cell. It is required to produce normal hormones like estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, aldosterone, and cortisone. Every long axon of every brain cell in your nervous system is ringed with cholesterol. It’s so important to your health that your own liver makes about 75% of all the cholesterol in your body.

The key is to have foods that increase the good (HDL) cholesterol, and avoid the foods that increase the bad (LDL) version.

How much of each?

At the risk of inducing a fear response in you, I’m going to give you a bit of a math problem. Ready? Your bad cholesterol (the LDL value) shouldn’t be more than three times higher than the good cholesterol (the HDL value).

In other words, if your good cholesterol is 50 – get ready, multiplication ahead! – then your bad cholesterol should not be more than 150. In this case, even though the total in this case is 200, your ratio of good to bad is still 3-to-1, and that makes it is okay.

And don’t worry about having too much HDL cholesterol. The current understanding is that there is no upper limit that you should avoid.