Hi. I'm professor Bob Graham. I'm a cardiologist and I work here at the
Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute and also at St Vincent's Hospital,
where I look after people with heart disease. So, a lot of people ask why
should I be concerned about cholesterol and that answer is fairly
straightforward, and that is that cholesterol is one of the major risk
factors for developing premature heart disease, particularly a heart attack.
Because we need cholesterol as it's important for our membranes
to form membranes around our cells and for various hormones that we make,
like cortisol but too much of it can not be cleared very well from the
body and it ends up in the walls of our blood vessels and it leads
to what's called plaque and that plaque is what causes a heart attack when it
lifts off the vessel wall. So you don't want to have too much cholesterol
because otherwise the body can't cope with that and it can't get rid of it
properly and so you form plaque and then you form I get a heart attack. So that's
why it's bad to have cholesterol and you should know about it and you should have
your blood cholesterol checked - certainly when you get to around about the age of
45 to 55 because that's when people start to get heart attacks.
Look, one of the problems with high cholesterol is that in of itself, it
doesn't cause problems. You don't know you've got a high cholesterol, so that's
why you need to have it checked but it can cause very serious consequences as
I mentioned so it's really important that you know whether your cholesterol is
high or not. So a lot of people ask is exercising and eating well sufficient to
ensure that your cholesterol level is normal and the answer is 'no.' By and large
most of the cholesterol in the body comes from cholesterol we make, rather
than cholesterol we eat. Only about 20% comes from the cholesterol we eat. If you
have high cholesterol and certainly maintaining a good diet with a low
intake of saturated fats is certainly sensible and we should do that and also
a high intake of fish containing foods is very important. But in and of
itself maintaining a good diet and exercising is not sufficient because
most of it is determined, the level in your blood is determined genetically. You
inherit the genes from your mum or dad and they determine whether you have high
cholesterol or low cholesterol. So even though you can help a little bit by
having a good diet and by exercising, by and large if you inherited, unfortunately
genes that are going to give you high cholesterol. there's not much you can do
about that even if you do lower your cholesterol in taking your food, that'll
only help marginally and certainly should be done but the answer then is
you probably need if you've got very high cholesterol to be treated with a
drug that lowers cholesterol so you don't develop plaque and don't go on and
get a heart attack. So what should you do if you've got high cholesterol?
You have to firstly modify your diet. Exercise is very good because exercise
raises the good cholesterol the HDL cholesterol. There is anecdotal evidence
that a small amount of alcohol can also help raise the good cholesterol and then
after that, if you cholesterol remains high, then almost definitely you should
be started on a drug that lowers your cholesterol to reduce
your risk of heart disease and we know that for every one percentage point of
cholesterol we lower you reduce your risk of heart disease by two percent.
It's been shown, I think incontrovertibly, that if you have high cholesterol and
you lower it, you do good. So look thank you for listening. I hope you found this
useful. if you have further questions we have a Q&A section on our website at the
Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute which is www.victorchang.edu.au.
We'll be very pleased to answer your questions
and look after yourselves and maintain a good lifestyle and diet and exercise
regularly, which is very very important