Recap: Why you should be wary of ‘low fat’ foods | Sarah Berry

Hello, and welcome to Zoe recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today, we're talking about cholesterol. If you're a regular listener of this podcast, you'll know that our cholesterol level is closely linked to heart health. With that in mind, it's easy to be drawn to foods labeled as low fat, reduced fat, or fat free, all of which seem to promise to keep our cholesterol low and our heart strong. However, is it really that simple? I'm joined by professor Sarah Berry to break down the difference between good and bad cholesterol, bust myths about low fat foods, and explain how we can make smarter food choices that support our heart. So cholesterol is a type of lipid. So it's a type of fat that circulates in our blood and that we can also eat, as well. And it's a waxy kind of substance. And it's something that's actually necessary for us. It plays a really important role in our body, so we need it to make many different hormones. We need it to make vitamin d. We need it to make bile acids that are essential for the absorption of fat. And actually, it's a component of every cell membrane in our body. Every single cell has it? Yes. Has cholesterol. So without cholesterol, we would be in a little bit of trouble. And so if I was in fact total, like, we have to have it, we wouldn't live without it. Yeah. And that's why our body makes it. You know, our bodies are so clever. So we don't make things that are bad for us just for the fun of it. It's where these natural processes become a little bit disbalanced. It's just where the problem comes in. But cholesterol is an essential part of our normal physiological functioning. And when we often hear about cholesterol, we also hear about it being in food we can eat. Is that the same cholesterol, or is that something different? So it's slightly different, but more importantly, the way it impacts our health is very, very different. And so what we know is that dietary cholesterol, so the cholesterol that we eat that, you know, is found in many foods, but for example, we might think of some foods as being very high like eggs, actually has very minimal impact on the cholesterol that circulates in our blood. Got it. So it's not just the cholesterol in my blood as a result of the food that I eat? No. So if cholesterol is, like, necessary and it's floating around inside our bodies, I guess my obvious question is, what's it doing in our blood? Because that's where I think the doctors are measuring it and getting concerned. And why is some of it considered bad? Yeah. So we know that there's some type of cholesterol, which we call LDL cholesterol, is bad for us. …