About Cholesterol and Heart Disease

High cholesterol can cause serious problem to one’s health, and it can cause atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, this can in turn leads to blocked coronary arteries, manifested by chest pain, or a heart attack. Other serious problems such as blocked arteries to the brain, for instance, can result in a stroke, while blocked arteries in the legs can cause pain, limping and even disability.

To understand the connection between heart disease and cholesterol better, there are few other things that need to be understood first.

First, what Cholesterol is…

Cholesterol is a fatty and wax-like substance that is naturally present in the human body, and your body uses this cholesterol in order to produce many different hormones, such as Vitamin D and the bile acids that help to digest fat. Although a certain amount of cholesterol is natural, if you have too much in your bloodstream then the excess may be deposited in the arteries of the heart, which in turn can lead to heart disease.

How to Prevent a Cholesterol and Heart Disease Problem:

Adopting a healthy lifestyle is the best thing you can do to prevent high cholesterol and heart disease problems. This means making sure that you eat the healthy and nutritious foods, and do exercise on a regular basis. Also stay away from smoking and excessive drinking of alcohol.

Healthy lifestyle and diet will almost guarantee a lower cholesterol, but if this does not work, then this is when medication is needed. Even if your doctor does prescribe a medication, you still have to follow your healthy lifestyle, be more physically active, stop cigarette smoking if you smoke and control other various risk factors, such as high blood pressure and diabetes for instance.

There are some risk factors which you are simply unable to control, such as your age and your family history, but by doing everything that you can, you will greatly reduce your risk of having high cholesterol and heart disease.

Hope this information is useful.

Check out this great book by Dr. Robert D. Willix Jr. “How to prevent and even reverse heart disease”.