The well known dangers of high cholesterol, due to the blockage of blood trying to flow through a clot or narrowed arteries often results in serious tissue damage, triggering heart attacks, strokes, and other cardiovascular problems.

A certain amount or number of cholesterol level is necessary for your body to function properly, and cholesterol is utilized by your body’s cells as it travels through the blood, assisting with functions like producing estrogen, vitamin D and testosterone. Cholesterol resembles a waxy substance, and essentially is found in two sources, either by digesting it through meat products or dairy, or producing cholesterol in our livers – and the body tends to produce most of the cholesterol it requires at any given time. The dangers of high cholesterol occur when excess chunks of the fat-like substance begin floating around in our blood. This serious problem with potentially hazardous effects to our health actually strikes millions of people worldwide.

The preventative steps to ward off the dangers of high cholesterol should begin when a person reaches 20 years old, and every adult of this age and over should get a blood test annually to determine the health of their cholesterol levels. Excess cholesterol can form on the inner artery walls throughout our bodies, forming a type of plaque or scar tissue, which is known as atherosclerosis. As this plaque hardens up, it narrows the artery walls and effectively reduces or even stops blood flow. Sometimes it even causes the hard and inflexible artery to tear. The body responds by forming a blood clot as its natural response to repairing the tear in the artery, but should the clot block blood flow, it can result in a stroke or other life threatening symptoms.

The trouble with high cholesterol is that you can’t really see or feel the dangers of high cholesterol. The disease of high cholesterol itself doesn’t even show any particular symptoms – it does its greatest harm by causing other diseases like strokes – that statistics show take a person’s life just over every thirty seconds. And that is certainly one of the most devastating and traumatic dangers of high cholesterol.