40 Fun Facts About Cholesterol

Which organ, only about 2% of body weight, holds roughly a quarter of all the cholesterol in the human body?

The brain makes its own supply on site, and most of it is packed into myelin, the fatty insulation wrapped around nerve fibers.

Which breakfast fruit can push some statins to risky levels in the blood by blocking an enzyme in the gut?

Grapefruit juice knocks out CYP3A4, an enzyme that normally breaks the drug down, so more of each dose stays in the body for longer.

Which nutrient does human skin make in sunlight from a close chemical relative of cholesterol?

Vitamin D starts life as 7-dehydrocholesterol, a compound sitting in the skin that ultraviolet B light converts.

Which cooking oil, rated healthy by most Americans in one survey, raises harmful LDL about as much as beef fat?

Coconut oil won a healthy rating from 72% of Americans in that survey, yet only 37% of nutrition experts agreed.

HDL earns its nickname of 'good' cholesterol by carrying excess cholesterol back to which organ for disposal?

The liver is also where the journey starts, because LDL particles carry cholesterol out from it to the rest of the body.

What name, shared with a dental problem, is given to the cholesterol-rich deposits that build up on artery walls?

Plaque can break open without warning, and the blood clot that forms on the rupture can block the artery completely.

Which breakfast grain, the focus of a 1980s bran craze, contains beta-glucan fiber that lowers LDL cholesterol?

Oats owe the craze to Quaker, which began promoting them as cholesterol-cutting after a 1986 study; FDA rules on such label claims followed in 1997.

Since high cholesterol usually causes no symptoms, what is the only way to find out you have it?

A blood test is the only way to know, and it can be as quick as a finger-prick sample instead of a needle in the arm.

A chicken egg is rich in cholesterol, but which part of the egg contains all of it?

The yolk carries the whole load, while the white is almost entirely water and protein with no cholesterol at all.

Which nutrient, plentiful in butter and fatty meat, raises LDL more than anything else in the diet?

Saturated fat outdoes even the cholesterol found in food, so the US government's TLC diet for lowering LDL keeps it under 7% of daily calories.

Which preparation, lasting 9 to 12 hours, are patients traditionally asked to follow before a cholesterol lipid panel?

Fasting means nothing but water, though studies have questioned whether it is needed and some labs now accept samples taken after a meal.

Besides total cholesterol, LDL and HDL, which fourth figure on a lipid panel measures the most common fat in the body?

Triglycerides are how the body banks spare calories: whatever you eat but do not need right away is converted and stored in fat cells.

Below which level, in mg/dL, do US health agencies class an adult's total cholesterol as desirable?

200 mg/dL is the line: readings from there up to 239 are labeled borderline high, and 240 or more counts as high.

Which habit lowers HDL, the 'good' cholesterol, with the effect especially marked in women?

Smoking hits from both sides, because it pushes LDL up at the same time as it drags the protective kind down.

After which stage of life does a woman's risk of high cholesterol rise, as protective hormone levels fall?

Menopause reverses an early advantage: between the ages of 20 and 39, men are the ones more likely to have high total cholesterol.

In LDL and HDL, the so-called bad and good cholesterol, which word does the final L stand for?

Lipoprotein particles are parcels of fat and protein, needed because fats must be attached to proteins to travel through the blood.

The word cholesterol joins the Greek for 'solid' to the Greek name of which digestive fluid?

Bile is khole in Greek, the same root hiding in melancholy, which literally means an excess of the black kind.

Cholesterol is the raw material for every steroid hormone, a family that includes which of these?

Cortisol is built from cholesterol in the adrenal glands, and the sex hormones estrogen and testosterone start from it too.

Cholesterol is a key building block of which structure in animal cells, sparing them the need for rigid walls?

The membrane stays stable and durable without turning rigid, which is what lets animal cells change shape and animals move.

Akira Endo found the first statin, mevastatin, in which kind of organism, also the source of penicillin?

A mold found in a Kyoto grain shop gave Endo the drug, after he had worked through some 6,000 compounds.

Which Pfizer statin became the world's best-selling medicine between 1996 and 2012, earning over $125 billion?

Lipitor, the brand name of atorvastatin, brought in $13 billion a year at its peak, up to a quarter of Pfizer's revenue.

Which side effect is the complaint most often linked to statins, reported by 10 to 15% of users in studies?

Muscle pain is usually the whole story: the dangerous muscle breakdown called rhabdomyolysis strikes no more than 1 or 2 users in 10,000 a year.

Which arteries, named from the Latin for crown, feed the heart muscle and can be narrowed by cholesterol build-up?

Coronary arteries earned the name in the 1670s because they surround the heart like a crown.

Xanthelasma, soft yellowish cholesterol deposits under the skin, usually appear on or around which part of the body?

The eyelids are where these flat yellow patches usually sit, and the name xanthelasma comes from the Greek words for yellow and foil.

An underactive state of which gland, treatable with a daily hormone pill, is a known cause of high cholesterol?

The thyroid can leave its mark even after treatment: cholesterol may stay raised once hormone tests have returned to normal.

Which Massachusetts community gave its name to the heart study, begun in 1948, that coined the term 'risk factor'?

Framingham sent 5,209 adults into the first cohort, and the study is now following a third generation of volunteers.

In 1913 the Russian pathologist Nikolay Anichkov tied cholesterol to artery disease by feeding it to which animals?

Rabbits on the diet grew artery lesions like those of human disease, a result one researcher wrote could have saved 30 years of argument.

Cholesterol was first isolated in the 18th century from which hard lumps that can form inside the body?

Gallstones made mainly of cholesterol are still a recognized type, and the attacks they cause often follow a fatty meal.

Which coffee-making method leaves in cafestol, a compound that raises cholesterol and that paper filters trap?

French press coffee and Turkish coffee carry the most cafestol, while paper-filtered drip coffee keeps only negligible amounts.

Which plant compounds, added to spreads such as Benecol, lower LDL by blocking cholesterol absorption in the gut?

Stanols at 2 to 3 grams a day trim LDL by roughly 10 to 15%, a real effect but far smaller than that of prescription drugs.

Which American physiologist, creator of the K-ration, led the Seven Countries Study on cholesterol and heart disease?

Ancel Keys also popularized the Mediterranean diet with his wife Margaret, and he lived to the age of 100.

Which fermented supplement naturally contains monacolin K, a compound chemically identical to the statin lovastatin?

Red yeast rice is so close to the medicine that the FDA says products containing monacolin K should be regulated as drugs.

Which unit do labs in Canada, the UK and most of Europe use for cholesterol instead of the American mg/dL?

In mmol/L the numbers look tiny: the NHS upper limit for total cholesterol in a healthy adult is just 5.

Which French chemist, who lived to the age of 102, gave cholesterol its original name, cholesterine?

Michel Chevreul took up the study of aging late in his own long life, and his name is one of 72 inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.

On a standard lipid panel, the LDL cholesterol figure is usually not measured but calculated with which equation?

The Friedewald equation lets a lab measure just three quantities directly and work out LDL from them by subtraction.

Which protein, the target of injectable drugs such as evolocumab, destroys the receptors that clear LDL from the blood?

PCSK9 was exposed by genetics: people born with a disabled copy of the gene have lower LDL and less heart disease.

Statins lower cholesterol by blocking which enzyme, one central to the body's own cholesterol production?

HMG-CoA reductase is also needed to make coenzyme Q10, one suspected reason the drugs cause side effects in some people.

The '-ol' ending of the word cholesterol tells chemists that the molecule belongs to which class of compounds?

Alcohols are marked by a hydroxyl group, and cholesterol's single one is the part of the molecule that interacts with water.

Familial hypercholesterolemia, an inherited cause of very high LDL, affects about what share of people?

1 in 250 makes it one of the commonest inherited disorders, though the severe form passed on by both parents is far rarer, at under 1 in 100,000.

Tangier disease, a rare disorder that leaves almost no HDL in the blood, is named after an island off which US state?

Virginia's Tangier Island is where the disorder was first found, and a telltale sign is tonsils turned yellow-orange by cholesterol deposits.