High Cholesterol Causes

March 27, 2010 | By Admin In Heart disease |

It is interesting to note that high blood cholesterol is considered one of the risk factors of heart disease that you can control. Yet, some of the causes of high cholesterol are not under your control while some are.

So what causes high cholesterol then?

  • Family history can be a factor.
  • Your body may have a genetic predisposition to produce more cholesterol due to inactivity or eating saturated fats.
  • Diabetics have an increased risk of high cholesterol.
  • You do not exercise enough.  If you begin to exercise at least 30 minutes per day, you will increase your good HDL cholesterol, while lowering your bad LDL cholesterol.
  • Your body produces sufficient amounts of cholesterol for its needs, but if you eat a diet high in fats and fatty dairy products, you raise the cholesterol levels even more.
  • If you are overweight or obese, your cholesterol is more likely to be high.
  • If you are a male, you are more likely to have high cholesterol.  This is because females are protected during their childbearing years due to the estrogen in their bodies.   However, this does NOT mean that women should ignore their cholesterol levels though during their childbearing years, as there still are women who develop high cholesterol during this time in their lives for other reasons.  When a woman reaches menopause, however, her chances of developing high cholesterol increase.

Until the next post…..

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1 Comment so far

  1. Stephen Guy-Clarke on August 24th, 2009

    In addition to the dangers of high cholesterol listed please take steps to reduce stress.
    Anyone who says they are not stressed is not strictly telling the truth: we have stress hormones circulating in our bloodstream in different amounts as long as we have a pulse!
    The fact is that our hormones have not evolved from caveman times when ‘Fight or Flight’ meant a choice – are we going to run from the Sabre Toothed Tiger or fight it?

    Today, however, if we are stuck in a traffic jam and about to miss that urgent appointment, our stress hormones are rushing around and it’s a bit like slipping our body’s clutch with our foot on the accelerator. Our adrenals pump out cortisol which galvanises the body during stress. The heart speeds up, blood pressure rises and our demand for energy means we switch from eating proteins towards sugars to fuel the muscles. Under normal circumstances, after the stressful event has passed, another hormone called DHEA acts like a handbrake to reduce the cortisol levels and the adrenals go into a resting phase.

    So what happens if the stress is ongoing? Firstly, the physiological effects of sustained stress can cause cravings for sugar which wildly affects our blood sugar levels and takes us on a roller coaster ride. We may find ourselves waking at 3 am, just as if a boiler timer had gone off, because of the adrenals shifting out of their 24-hour rhythm and starting the anabolic cycle too soon. We don’t reach the restorative REM (rapid eye movement) state even when we are asleep, so we feel TATT (tired all the time). Our immune function becomes impaired and, in addition to potential depression, we are liable to get allergies of all kinds and osteoporosis. Wow! we should have a national flag day for the adrenals to draw attention to the physiological effects of stress.