Cholesterol what's it good for

Do you know that your body manufactures cholesterol whether you have it in your diet or not?

This is done in your liver.

If you are told to go on a low-fat diet (which means a low cholesterol diet) for a condition of obesity or heart disease or other associated disease states, you should know that as fast as you eliminate animal fats from your diet you ought to add vegetable fats (that is vegetable oils), or you will be storing up more trouble than you had in the first place.

Cholesterol performs several important functions in the body. Perhaps the most important of these is its role in forming and maintaining cell walls and structures. Cells also need cholesterol to help them adjust to changes in temperature, and it's used by nerve cells for insulation.

Additionally, cholesterol is essential for synthesizing a number of critical hormones, including the sex hormones testosterone, progesterone and estrogen.

Bile, a fluid produced by the liver, plays a vital role in the processing and digestion of fats. To make bile, the liver uses cholesterol. Your body also needs cholesterol to make vitamin D; in the presence of sunlight, cholesterol is converted into vitamin D.

More specifically, cholesterol that's packaged by the liver into lipoproteins are dense with proteins and have less fat. These high-density lipoproteins, or HDL, are the "good" cholesterol. What's good about HDL is the way it seems to remove plaques of LDL inside arteries, "cleaning" the arteries as it moves through the bloodstream.