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Although cholesterol has gotten a bad rap over the years, it's not, by itself, a bad thing.Cholesterol is a soft, faintly yellow, naturally occurring waxy substance found in cell walls and membranes throughout your body, including your brain, nerves, muscles, skin, liver, intestines, and heart. It's one of several fats, or lipids, your body produces. Without enough cholesterol, you simply couldn't live.
You use cholesterol to produce sex hormones (including estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone), vitamin D, and bile acids that help you digest fat. However, you need only a relatively small amount to take care of all of these things. And your body (your liver, intestines, and even skin) manufactures plenty of it -- about three or four times more cholesterol than most Americans eat. That means you could go the rest of your life without ever consuming another bite of cholesterol and you'd be just fine. (Although there's no need to do so. In actuality, eating too many foods that contain cholesterol is not the main cause of high blood cholesterol.)
Like so many things, cholesterol isn't bad for you unless there's too much of it, at which point it begins to cause trouble. The story isn't quite that simple, however. As you probably already know, there are different kinds of cholesterol -- some bad, some good. And how much you have of each type makes a tremendous difference in your likelihood of developing coronary heart disease (CHD).
It's actually not cholesterol per se that's good or bad for you, but the "vehicle" through which it travels your bloodstream. Because cholesterol is waxy, it can't mix with blood, which is watery. Like oil in a salad dressing, it remains separate. To enter the cells and tissues where it's needed, then, it hooks up with proteins, creating special transporters called lipoproteins. Think of these as submarine-like bubbles that carry cholesterol around the body. Some of these "submarines" are friends, but most are foes.
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