All About Cholesterol

This substance can be harmful—or helpful— to your arteries. The trick is to boost the good kind and slash the bad.

- Sunny Sea Gold

CHOLESTEROL performs more than one vital job: The fatlike substance is a building block for the intestinal acids that digest your food, it helps keep cell walls healthy, and it allows your body to produce all-important vitamin D. Like most things in life, however, too much can be problematic.

“One myth that patients often bring up is: ‘I heard cholesterol doesn’t really matter anymore, that heart risk is more about inflammation,’ ” says Suzanne Steinbaum, DO, a cardiologist at the Mount Sinai Hospital and volunteer medical expert with the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women campaign. While inflammation is important, cholesterol absolutely still matters, she says. One large study published in the journal Circulation in 2015, for example, found that for every decade that someone was living with high “bad” cholesterol, their chances of having a heart attack or stroke increased by 40 percent above their normal risk level.

But here’s the most important message doctors want to get out: “We have so much more control over cholesterol than people think,” says Dr. Steinbaum— meaning simple, everyday choices can make a real impact on your cardiovascular health.

The Different Types