How Cholesterol Affects Everyone

Greg: Greg Mill, Cerritos, California. I thought high cholesterol was for overweight people. Why do underweight people have high cholesterol problems as well?

Dr. Melvyn Rubenfire: Actually Greg the elevated cholesterol doesn’t really tie end to overweight and obesity. Thin people can have a very high cholesterol. Overweight people can have a very low cholesterol. It turns out that when you're overweight the very good cholesterol called the HDL cholesterol is generally lower. That’s one of the reasons why people who are overweight have increase cardiac risk.

But there’s not much tie-end between obesity or being overweight and a high cholesterol. The only tie-end might be if the overweight was due to eating a lot of saturated fats. If you eat a lot of meat, fatty meat choices and a lot of fried foods those saturated fats and those food substances will cause a rise in the cholesterol. So that would be the tie-end between being overweight and high cholesterol. It would be your own diet.


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