As an analogy: we eat sugar and our liver produces glucose, but for our body to use it our pancreas has to make insulin to process it to give us energy. All works well unless we eat more sugar than our pancreas can keep up with.
What process does the body use to make cholesterol useful? What turns it from a fatty thing into brain fuel? Do we know? And what systems are we stressing if we have a double bacon cheeseburger with two eggs for breakfast?
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I’ve been under the impression that cholesterol is not metabolized in our bodies. It is made, recycled around and eventually excreted, but not broken down.
Cholesterol doesn’t work like that, while it is a fat, it isn’t used for energy. It has a lot of uses as a structural component and as a precursor molecule that gets turned into other things. Primarily it’s a major structural component of all cell membranes, it’s used to make a lot of hormones, and it’s essential in making vitamin D.
You actually need a decent amount of it and our livers and intestines can make most of what we need. We hear about it mostly as a problem now because our diet gives us so much excess nowadays, and when you have too much it sticks to the blood vessels and clogs them up.
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