How LDL – the ‘bad boy’ of cholesterol – can kill you!

Actually just a ‘carrier’ and not cholesterol, LDL or Low Density Lipoprotein has earned the ‘bad boy’ label. In this post, we understand more about it – why is it needed by our body? How is it bad for us?

LDL’s like a bus which carries cholesterol

Cholesterol cannot dissolve in blood and has to be transported to and from cells in the body by carriers called lipoproteins. But not all lipoproteins are alike.

Think of the arteries of the body as a highway and the lipoproteins as buses. Now, there are ones that are very efficient, like well maintained private buses. They are extremely focused and carry their load of cholesterol from the body right to the liver for elimination from the body. These are HDL (high density liporoteins) also known as ‘good cholesterol’.

How does LDL harm us?

Then there is LDL or low density lipoprotein, the ‘bad cholesterol’.  While the HDL carries the cholesterol to the liver for elimination, LDL carries it to the cells of the body. And it doesn’t even do this job efficiently. It keeps dropping off debris on the way eventually leading to a build up of cholesterol at various sites along the blood vessel.

Secondly, LDL is much smaller than HDL in size and is able to literally ‘sneak in’ to the inner wall of the blood vessel leading to a build up on the vessel wall too. To make matters worse, the white blood cells (defense cells) which come to take charge of the chaos and repair the damage caused by LDL, only to cause further build up of material in the location. So, the cholesterol, the LDL, the white blood cells plus other debris form a ‘plaque’ which ends up blocking the blood vessel (artherosclerosis).

Now, why is plaque bad for our heart?

The plaque can either completely block the passage of blood through the artery or parts of it break away and get lodged further down the same blood vessel. This can cause  more plaque formation or block a certain part where it branches out into other parts of the body.  Now when this happens in the arteries which supply the heart muscle (coronary arteries), it reduces the blood supply to certain parts causing inefficient pumping. Basically, the heart isn’t able to pump strong enough or fast enough to meet the body’s demands. This can eventually cause heart attacks and other heart problems.

One must remember that all this does not happen overnight. It takes a couple of years to form a complete block within the cardiovascular arteries. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle along with a healthy diet can help stop and even reverse mild arterial plaque formation.