I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Organs Zone. It has scientists studying health and disease in various parts of our bodies. Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
Great question, 123becca!
What most people don’t know is that cholesterol is really important, and really good for you, but its when there’s too much that it can be bad.
Cholesterol is found in the membrane of all the cells in the body. The membrane is kinda like the wrapper that holds the contents in, so you can imagine, it’s very important.
Cholesterol is also wrapped around all of the brain cells (called myelin) and helps the brain cells to get the messages to your organs and muscles quickly. If there’s not enough cholesterol around your brain and nerve cells, you will have problems using your muscles.
Cholesterol is also used to make hormones, which send messages around your body. Without cholesterol, you couldn’t have a baby (because cholesterol is made into estrogen and testosterone).
There’s actually millions of things cholesterol is needed for.
The biggest problem is that high levels of cholesterol (found in animal products like eggs and meat and processed, fatty foods) can be dangerous. It can get stuck on the inside of your blood vessels and cause them to close, and that’s when you can have a heart attack or stroke.
But it’s very important to remember that cholesterol is actually really important and good for our body, but that we need to be careful not to eat too much!
1
There are 2 types of cholesterol. There’s a good (HDL) and bad (LDL) cholesterol, which are technically a type of fat.
It’s the ratio between the 2 that is important! There are foods that are high in HDL and some foods that are high in LDL, and as luck would have it the foods that you’re told to eat mostly have high levels of HDL…
Hannah has done a great job telling you what cholesterol does.
0
Nicely answered folks!
As Hannah mentioned- cholesterol is actually very important for normal nerve function and in the production of the sex hormones which affect many more of your body’s behaviours!
0