Why Does Cholesterol Go Up With Age?

… Continuing …

Overtime, your diet can put you at greater chance of getting more cholesterol. This means that the chance of eating and getting more fatty foods (high in saturated fat and cholesterol) from your diet increases as you age.

Even if you can stick with a healthy diet and low in saturated fat all the time, this doesn’t mean you can completely remove your chance of getting the accumulation of fatty deposits and cholesterol on the walls of your blood vessels – unless if you can totally skip any foods-contained cholesterol all the time in your life (a mission impossible)!

Furthermore, most of our body’s functions decrease as we get older, including for the body’s function in controlling cholesterol.

In older adults, their blood vessels and other body’s functions in helping regulate the blood flow cannot work as optimal as in younger adults. Either for the ability of heart in pumping blood all around the body, it is also more likely to decrease as we get older.

With the same exercise (either in quantity or quality) and diet, older adults need to take more effort to improve their HDL than younger adults. For instance, while cardio exercise alone may be enough to help maintain weight and improve metabolic rate for individuals in their 20s, it will be not enough for weight control in the age of 30s or over. And having overweight means increased risk of high cholesterol.

Overall we can conclude that some risk factors of high cholesterol tend to occur as we get older.

These risk factors include obesity (you are more likely to lose more lean muscles as you get older), hypertension (high blood pressure), type-2 diabetes, and physically inactive (in fact if compared with younger adults, older adults have greater chance of becoming sedentary individual).