How Cholesterol Contributes to Heart Disease

This video by TV360 shows you how cholesterol contributes to heart disease which may result in death.

How Cholesterol Contributes to Heart Disease Jean story is unfortunately all too typical, both of her parents died of sudden cardiac death, and unfortunately heart disease in America is often a disease that appears very suddenly. In about half of women and two-thirds of men that develop heart disease, the very first symptom of a disease is ether a large heart attack or sudden death. Lowering cholesterol has a profound effect in reducing the risk of heart attack, stroke and death. It is at least a one-third reduction and it can be in certain patients a 50% reduction. Exercise plays a key role. Minimum of 20 to 30 minutes three times a week is healthy. If you can exercise every day and the longer you can go the better, and it doesn’t have to be really vigorous. A brisk walk for 30 to 40 minutes a day will do a lot of good. Jean has been very successful at lowering her cholesterol with diet and it sounds like she really has done her homework. She’s got all the ideas in her thought process when she buys and consumes food. She understands that fruits and vegetables are healthy, that meat and animal fat tends to raise cholesterol levels. She understands that trans fats are very important problem. These are those fats that are produced artificially and used in a lot of products like cookies and other sort of things. And she was able to lower her total cholesterol from 297 to 215. Now 215 is still moderately high, given her family history, it would be important for her to talk to her doctor about taking a medication to lower cholesterol as well. Now we never want medications to substitute for healthy lifestyle. We want to use the two therapies together plus sometimes a little bit of medication can have a very dramatic effect. It is also important that people understand that there are a lot of remedies being sold over-the-counter so called dietary supplements to try to regulate cholesterol. Most of these are fraudulent and they don’t have a beneficial effect. The things that work are diet and exercise and prescription medications. And combination of the two we can control the cholesterol in 99% of the people in America, but we need that partnership between an educated patient and a physician to get the job done.