Cholesterol from diet and phytosterols are directly linked to heart disease.

Guide: Cholesterol and phytosterols absorb the genetic variability above, which can have an impact on the risk of cardiovascular disease.
, scientists at Gene Decodings, a subsidiary of Amgen, and co-authors from the Icelandic Health System, the University of Iceland, the University of Copenhagen Biobank, and the Danish Blood Donor Research Group recently published a research paper in the European Heart Journal, which found new findings that point to the adverse effects of cholesterol and plant alcohols derived from diet.
it is now fully believed that "bad" cholesterol (also known as non-HDL cholesterol and LDL cholesterol) can directly affect the development of cardiovascular disease. People who
higher levels of bad cholesterol in their blood, or who are at higher risk of heart disease because of other causes, are generally advised to lower their cholesterol levels by making lifestyle changes, and sometimes to take cholesterol-lowering drugs such as statins.
blood cholesterol levels are also influenced by genetics and the environment, especially diet, which increases as saturated fat ( mainly found in red meat and fatty dairy products) .
, however, there has been much debate for decades about the importance of dietary cholesterol in regulating blood cholesterol levels and heart disease risk.
most cholesterol-rich foods are also rich in saturated fat, but there are exceptions, such as eggs and shellfish.
plant sterols are a small amount of cholesterol-like moleculefound in all plant foods, including fruits, vegetables, nuts, and beans.
use a large amount of phytosterol stortol to enrich foods , mainly margarine and dairy products , and are often recommended as part of a heart-healthy diet that may reduce the levels of cholesterol that are absorbed from the diet.
transportproteins NPC1L1 and ABCG5/8, which control the absorption of cholesterol and phytosterols from the diet.
NPC1L1 transports sterols from the intestinal cavity to intestinal epithelial cells, where ABCG5/8 can excrete less than half of cholesterol, but most plant sterols return to the intestinal cavity.
, as a result, we generally absorb about 50 to 60 percent of the cholesterol that enters the gut, but only 5 percent of the plant sterols from the diet. The authors of the
study studied the effects of sequence variations that regulate the function of ABCG5/8 transport proteins in controlling blood cholesterol and phytosterol levels, as well as the risk of coronary artery disease from large collections of biological banks in Iceland, Denmark and the United Kingdom. The effects of
sequence variation were measured in as many as 147,000 coronary artery disease patients and 922,000 people without coronary artery disease.
studies have shown that people with sequence variationthat that reduce the function of ABCG5/8 transport proteins have an increase in blood cholesterol and phytosterol levels, as well as the risk of heart disease.
these findings confirm that cholesterol from diet can affect blood cholesterol levels and the risk of heart attack.
results also show that when people consume cholesterol, cholesterol absorption levels vary from person to person.
study also showed that the ABCG5/8 mutation, which affects cholesterol and phytosterol levels, had a greater effect on the risk of heart disease than other cholesterol variants that did not affect plant sterol content.
these findings support the idea that phytosterols may be directly related to the formation of atherosclerosis, raising questions about the safety of using phytosterols to supplement food nutrition. "
The study by Helgadottir and others is not only the best to date to support the hypothesis that the variation of the ABCG5/ABCG8 site is directly related to atherosclerosis heart disease, but also provides a powerful impetus for the study of the role of non-cholesterol steroids in this process," oliver Weing?rtner said in an accompanying editorial accompanying the paper.
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