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Lecture Notes

The third major risk factor for cardiovascular disease that we'll talk about that's modifiable are high levels of fat in the blood, both cholesterol and triglycerides, and if your levels of cholesterol are elevated, either from eating too much food containing cholesterol or from the rate at which the cholesterol is processed by the liver, it can begin to build up in the walls of the arteries like we talked about earlier in this lesson. And so, again, we want to eat less of those low density lipoproteins, or the bad cholesterols, and more of the good cholesterol, or high density lipoproteins. The other type of fat that can build up in your blood are called triglycerides, and these are also associated with the development of atherosclerosis.