People with extremely high levels of so-called “good cholesterol” have a 65 per cent higher mortality rate than people with normal levels, according to a new Danish study. Does this mean that good cholesterol has gone from hero to villain? Can we still consider good cholesterol to be good?
Cholesterol, it seems, is never far from the news. Scientific studies frequently report that cholesterol and the drugs that control cholesterol, such as statins, are implicated in many conditions beyond heart disease, from Alzheimer’s to cancer. Cholesterol is essential for life, and is found throughout the body. It is a waxy substance made in the the liver but is also found in some foods, including full-cream dairy and animal fats.
Cholesterol can’t travel through the blood on its own as it doesn’t dissolve in the watery blood plasma. In order to travel in the blood, cholesterol combines with proteins to form lipoproteins. There are two main types of lipoproteins, low-density lipoproteins (LDL) and high-density lipoproteins (HDL). LDL is commonly referred to as “bad cholesterol” because it delivers cholesterol from the liver to the other cells in the body. HDL is known as “good cholesterol” because it does the reverse, carrying cholesterol back to the liver to be broken down.
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