What is cholesterol?

Before we consider what cholesterol is, let us say what cholesterol is not: Cholesterol is not a fat; it isn't made from fat; it isn't even made from saturated fat. Cholesterol is an alcohol called a 'lipid alcohol'.

You can be forgiven for thinking that cholesterol is a harmful alien substance that must be avoided at all costs. It isn't! Cholesterol is an essential component in our bodies with a wide range of uses:

• Cholesterol is vital to keep cell membranes throughout the body intact and permeable so that nutrients can pass into the cells, and waste products can leave them.
• Cholesterol is also found in the brain and nerve cells, where it is essential for nerve transmission and for brain function.
• Cholesterol is used to maintain normal hormone production including the sex hormones in both men and women.
• Cholesterol is crucial for the manufacture of the important anti-stress hormone, cortisol.
• Cholesterol is essential for the proper functioning of the immune system.
• Cholesterol is used, in conjunction with sun on the skin, to make Vitamin D₃.
• Cholesterol is used to make bile acids, essential for proper digestion of fats and in ridding the body of waste products.
• Cholesterol is so important that practically every body cell has the ability to make it.

Your body can absorb only about 300 mg of cholesterol per day from the foods you eat and, as your body needs many times that amount, it then makes up the difference. Although the major proportion is manufactured in the liver, almost all body cells can make cholesterol. For this reason, if you eat less cholesterol, your body will compensate by making more cholesterol; if you eat more cholesterol, your body will make less. And you can eat foods containing as much as 5 times the usual 300 mg without it having any effect on the amount of cholesterol in your blood. So it doesn't matter how much cholesterol you eat.

It has taken over a quarter of a century for it to be realised that you can eat as much cholesterol as you like. Yet still the unsupported dogma goes on.