The Importance Of Lipids

Dr Vinaya Simha explains how lipids are crucial for managing heart health.

Lipids explained

Lipids are a group of substances which have a common property of being insoluble in water. This includes cholesterol, triglycerides, cholesteryl esters and phospholipids. The common thing about these is that they are insoluble in water. This is what makes them important. In order to solubilise them, they are made into lipoproteins and which are then transported from one part of the body to another and that's when many problems occur. During the transportation of these proteins, if there is a problem while processing, they may enter into the endothelium and may cause problems.

There are different types of lipids:

Simple lipids

Complex lipids

In the body, we have free fatty acids but otherwise, most of the lipids are actually components of lipoprotein (complex lipids and proteins). Depending upon the actual composition of the lipoproteins we further have chylomicrons, very low density lipoproteins, low density lipoproteins and high density lipoproteins. When lipoprotein has cholesterol attached to the bad protein, it is said to be “bad cholesterol” – the example is LDL cholesterol. When the lipoprotein has cholesterol attached to the good protein, it is called good cholesterol the HDL Cholesterol is the prime example.

Role of cholesterol