Hello and welcome to Ask the Nutrition is part of our Dishing Up Nutrition series where we focus

on a topic in-depth that was requested by listeners.

I'm Teresa Wagner, a registered and licensed dietitian, and today I'll be

discussing a health condition that may be new to you, familial hyper-cholostrolemia. What this is,

is a rare genetic disorder that causes someone to have very high levels of low-density lipoprotein

or LDL cholesterol, commonly referred to as the bad cholesterol.

So for individuals with this condition, they will usually have high levels of LDL even while

following a good

diet and exercise routine. Ideally, we would want a healthy LDL level to be less than 100 milligrams

per decilator. But for those with familial hypercholestrolemia, their LDL level is usually two to three times higher than normal, 200 to even higher than 400 milligrams per deciliter in the most severe cases.

So let's back up and talk about what LDL cholesterol is and what it does for us.

As I said earlier, it is referred to as the bad cholesterol, but it does serve an important

function in our body.

Our blood vessels can become inflamed and damage from things like a poor diet, high-end

sugars and bad fats, chronic stress, medications, smoking, alcohol.

When we have inflammation on the inside of our blood vessels, they can become damaged.

The LDL cholesterol is the patching material that comes along and acts like a band-aid,

patching it up. If you continue to have damage,

you can imagine that those band-aids will they start to pile up? And this creates plaque.

And as the plaque builds up, it causes the blood vessels to become more and more narrow and hardened. That's where the cardiac

risk develops because a piece of plaque could break off and cause blockage in a smaller blood

vessel down the line. Or the thickening of the arteries can cause a complete blockage,

...