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We are usually told that cholesterol comes in two varieties\u2014LDL and HDL. <\/p>\nWe are usually told that cholesterol comes in two varieties\u2014LDL and HDL. <\/p>\n
But a new study in the journal Atherosclerosis reveals that health-wise, this is a shortsighted way of looking at it. <\/p>\n
There\u2019s a third type of cholesterol that you really need to pay attention to because it\u2019s just as bad as the bad stuff you already know about.<\/p>\n
Cholesterol travels around the body in your blood, in packages called lipoproteins. We usually talk about two types, called:<\/p>\n
1. LDL cholesterol. This is transported in low-density lipoprotein packages and is often called \u2018bad\u2019 cholesterol because it causes cardiovascular disease.<\/p>\n
2. HDL cholesterol. This circulates in high-density lipoprotein packages and is often called \u2018good\u2019 cholesterol because it transports bad cholesterol to your liver, which breaks it down for excretion.<\/p>\n
But now there\u2019s a third category (well, it\u2019s actually been known about for a long time):<\/p>\n
3. Remnant cholesterol. This is transported in triglyceride-rich lipoproteins (or fat particles if this lipoprotein stuff is too much of a mouthful for you). It\u2019s another bad type of cholesterol because it causes cardiovascular disease too.<\/p>\n
Up to now, scientists have ignored remnant cholesterol too much, because they thought there wasn\u2019t all that much of it flowing in our bloodstreams. However, the new study has made them think again.<\/p>\n
It shows that it\u2019s more abundant than was previously thought, which makes it just as much of a heart disease risk as LDL is.<\/p>\n
The authors looked at medical information from 9,293 participants in the Copenhagen General Population Study. This is a survey of 140,000 people who receive free health checks, investigating the causes of good and bad health.<\/p>\n
They used a new and advanced measuring tool called metabolomics to check the cholesterol levels of their subsample.<\/p>\n
The new tool showed that the subjects had roughly equal amounts of LDL, HDL, and remnant cholesterol in their blood, which came as a bit of a shock. <\/p>\n
Remnant cholesterol levels were the same as LDL levels, which means there was twice the amount of bad stuff as they were expecting. <\/p>\n
Previous research has shown that remnant cholesterol is a serious risk for heart attack and stroke, so we need to keep our remnant cholesterol levels as low as possible.<\/p>\n