Word: cholesterol
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Would a high-fat diet be particularly damaging to your health, given your genetic makeup? About 15% of folks are born with a form of a liver enzyme that causes their HDL, or good cholesterol, level to go down in response to dietary fat. In most people the HDL level goes up, counterbalancing some of the bad effects of dietary fat on LDL--the dangerous cholesterol...
...triglycerides aren't quite the whole story either. Over the past few years, researchers have identified yet another form of fat that could rightly be labeled Bad Cholesterol II. Called lipoprotein (a), or Lp(a), it behaves like LDL in the body. But because Lp(a) levels have more to do with your genes than your diet, they can't easily be controlled. At best, doctors think they can use Lp(a) screening to find people who should be working extra hard to reduce their other heart-attack risks...
Some studies have also shown that exercise raises HDL levels; that it increases the volume of plasma (blood's liquid component), thinning the blood and thus keeping dangerous clots at a minimum; and that it may boost levels of an enzyme that vacuums cholesterol and fatty acids from the blood...
...innocent substances and transform them into killers. Free radicals may be responsible in part for the genetic damage that leads to some cancers. And they also appear to be what makes LDL and triglycerides so dangerous. When a free radical combines with one of these fatty molecules, the altered cholesterol turns into a biochemical cannonball that ricochets around the bloodstream, damaging the inner walls of vessels...
...beta-carotene supplements as cancer fighters a few years ago--it may turn out that phytochemicals work only in tandem with one another or with other chemicals found in foods. Trying to isolate the "active ingredient" might be a fool's errand. Says Dr. Ronald Krauss, a nutrition and cholesterol researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab: "It's premature to interpret that research in any way other than you should eat more fruits and vegetables...