What is Cholesterol?

Video Transcript

Hello, my name is Dr. Susan Jewell and on behalf of Expert Village, I want to talk to you about the subject of cholesterol. Particularly high cholesterol and also I want to talk to you in detail later on in this series of clips about ways to lower your intake of cholesterol. But let's break up the definition of cholesterol. What is actually cholesterol? What cholesterol is actually made up of? There are two types. There's the LDL. Which you all know is the bad form of cholesterol and there is the HDL which is the good form of cholesterol. And this is the category of cholesterol that you want to increase the intake of because that's actually healthy for your body. Now it is recommended in the medical profession that when you go in and test for your cholesterol levels that we take a sample of blood and then we do specific cholesterol testing. There is a number. A cut off number that we want to keep these particular categories of cholesterol within. So with the bad cholesterol. The LDL we want to make sure that you maintain a number of below a hundred. To say that, anything over a hundred is a warning sign that we need to address. So below a hundred for LDL. And for HDL the good cholesterol, the higher the better. Between forty to sixty, which is a good target number to achieve? Then when a doctor says your total cholesterol. Then you are going to say, "What's that?" Your total cholesterol is actually, the definition is the sum of both the HDL, the LDL and the HDL added together. And that number should be 200 or below. Because anything over 200 is a red flag warning that there is something you need to adjust or change in your lifestyle, your intake of your diet because you are eating too much bad cholesterol in your diet and that we need to manage that so it decrease your risk of getting disease. Like cardio vascular diseases because high cholesterol especially the LDL levels is a major factor that contributes to cardio vascular diseases like heart attack and strokes.

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