Why does some fat clog your arteries and other fat make you chubby?
In: Biology
[removed]
Fat doesn’t clog arteries. Cholesterol does. Cholesterol is not a fat. Its more like a fattyish wax and it so happens, your liver makes it. Its used in many processes in our body and even in cell walls, but when you get too much of it, either through diet or your body is over producing it, it gets deposited on arterial walls.
My father was not a fat man. Worked construction for 30 years and strong as a ox and in shape, but he still needed a quadruple bypass due to his crappy high cholesterol diet + bad genetics.
When the body has excess energy and nutrients it doesn’t need to use, it builds fat cells to store them. That’s the fat that makes you chubby.
Fat has all these designated places in the body (fat deposits) where they’re built. The cells themselves are built “on location,” so it’s not as if the fat cells themselves are moving through the bloodstream. However, the building blocks for them are, because the blood is the highway network of the body. And sometimes, these building blocks get loose and just float around aimlessly, or get stuck on the walls of a blood vessel.
Now, for a person with a healthy diet, this is negligible. These building blocks are really really tiny. But for a body that’s intaking a *lot* of calories every day, now there’s a lot of these building blocks being moved around. So it’s easy for more building blocks to get lost and get stuck with it. And soon, it’s built up enough that it’s causing bloodflow issues, like a kink in a hose or a closed lane on a highway.
That isn’t how it works. You become chubby due to consumption of too many calories. It could be anything. Protein, alcohol, carbohydrates or fats.
As to closing arteries, that process is complex with a significant genetic component as well the issue with saturated fats and cholesterol.
One satisfying simple reason this contributes is that some fats are symmetrical in shape and streamlined and some are not, this makes some fats inherently more disruptive to your arteries because their edges hang out at a wide angle and get stuck on other fats or molecules more easily.
All fat makes you chubby if you eat too much. All proteins and carbs do too. Too much food and not enough exercise makes you fat.
When you eat fats, some are not water soluble and harden at room normal temperatures. Think pizza grease that turns hard as it cools. This types of fats harden in your bloodstream and stick to your arterial walls. If you eat too much of this type of fat it creates blockages and may give you a heart attack or cardiac occlusion.
Latest Answers