They are chemicals made from cholesterol.

Cholesterol has four main uses in the body, which means, although excessive amounts are not good for you, in fact it's an essential nutrient, such that even if you cut it out of your diet, your body will synthesize it if need be.

The first thing is, it's an essential component of cell membranes. Lipids form the bulk of cell membranes, but cholesterol is used as a sort of mortar to keep the membrane stable at locations where receptors are poking thorugh the cell membrane. For that reason alone it's essential

The second use, by volume, is that it's used to make bile salts, which are used to disolve fats in the small intestine. If those fats are not disolved, then they cannot be digested.

The third use is that they are used as the building blocks for fat soluble vitamins. For example, if you take cholesterol and expose it to UV light, then it will break apart and reform as a molecule of vitamin D.

The final use is that it's the building block for many of the body's hormones.

The big trick to keeping cholesterol levels down is to eat pectin.

Pectin is a non-digestible fibre like cellulose, but it encourages the growth of bacteria that eat bile salts.

If bile salts are not eaten by the time they get to the large intestine, then the large intesting reabsorbs the bile salts and turns them back into cholesterol, but if you eat lots of pectin, then you get lots of the bacteria that eat bile salts, such that there's no bile salts to be reabsorbed and formed back into cholesterol by the time things reach the large intestine, which means your body has to pull cholestrol from the blood stream to make more bile salts.

The whole trick to keeping cholesterol down is not to cut it from your diet, because your body will make it anyway if you dont' eat it, because it's essential for cell membranes and bile salts and vitamins and hormons. The trick is to eat pectin, which makes sure there's a way *out* for cholesterol if you've got too much.

One of the *best* sources of pectin is apples, so the old adage about "an apple a day..." is true. You can eat eggs all you want as long as you stuff yourself with apples too, or think of it like the Dutch and Beligians would, where they'll put applesauce on eggs.

Permalink | Report