Eli5 Why do foods always say reduces risk of plaque building in coronary artery? Does nothing slowly get rid of it?
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It doesn’t really ever go away but it takes decades for it to really start building up. It’s kind of like hard water causing calcium to build up in your pipes. The cholesterol in your body gets trapped in the wall of large vessels and then immune cells try to get rid of it but then they can get stuck there as well. Some foods increase the amount of good cholesterol (polyunsaturated fats) that can move some of that cholesterol out and some foods will increase the amount of bad cholesterol (trans-fats, saturated fats) which increase the amount of cholesterol that can potentially get trapped. But there’s no magic solution to just clean it up.
The plaque can also get hardened like a scar which narrows the artery and causes things like angina, or it could be loose like a bit of fat that can get dislodged which causes things like heart attacks.
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