Cholesterol is healthy.... not a phrase you hear much. Cholesterol is a word normally associated with the risk of heart disease, heart attacks, arterial disease, high LDL, all that scary stuff.

Cholesterol is a kind of fat. One of the most important jobs it performs in our bodies, is to build the myelin sheath, or waxy coating around our nerve tissues. If you do not eat enough fat, you could create a condition called demyelination. This means that your nerves lose their coating, or their insulation. Just like an electrical wire, which loses its coating, the signals lose their transmission.

In your home, loss of signal or a short circuit means calling an electrician and getting new wiring put in. Easy to do. But what about if it's in your brain, or your spinal chord? And how could this come about?

Start with two of the simpler situations - a non-fat diet, or statin drugs.

Depriving your body of fats, or taking stain drugs to lower your LDL levels, prevents the body's repair process for any disruptions in your myelin sheaths. Your body is very smart, and it will send in a "crew" to repair any imperfections in the coating of your nerves. In your brain, your brain stem, your spinal cord, anywhere.

While your electrician will come in with fresh wiring, and properly coated wiring, and just pull out the damaged stuff, your body cannot. But it can, and will try, to repair the coating. And it uses cholesterol to do this.

All the nutrients you are (hopefully) eating on a daily basis are involved with all your body processes. While I am addressing fats in this article, there is no nutrient that alone will make everything function perfectly all the time. But they have their starring roles.

Fats carry certain substances around your body - the fat-soluble vitamins such as Vitamin A, Vitamin E, Vitamin K and CoQ10.

Also, your body has a reaction to deprivation. If your body thinks it is starving, it will not "give up" the fat. So while a calorie reduced diet is a wise choice, eliminating fat is not a solution. Reduce fat, but eat the best quality fats daily, in the proper amounts.

Fats and proteins are "buddies in good times" . Your body will burn energy supplied by fats. Your body needs vitamins and minerals to do so. But you do not need carbohydrates from what we have come to think of as the typical modern diet.

Industrially manufactured breads, crackers, sweets, pastas and so forth, could be completely eliminated from our diets. Boy are they good - crunchy or soft, sweet or salty, they tell us we are fed, we are full. We are used to it.

But, our meats, poultry, fish, fruits, salads and vegetables provide us with all the carbohydrates we can possibly use. Unfortunately, grains in the form of breads, cereals, crackers, pastries and pastas became a part of the human diet in a big way, long before the workings of the human body were understood, in our medical system.

I am not a doctor, I am a person interested in real health. In my family, we gain weight easily. I have many friends who gain weight easily. We have all tried almost every diet on the market. I have not seen ANY of them work. NONE. On an ongoing basis.

I also know people, and know of people, with MS, Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimer's Disease and endocrine imbalances. Young and old.

The diseases mentioned above are all associated with demyelination - the deterioration of the coating of the nerves.

I have not put this all together yet, and I'm sure the medical specialists will before I do. But I'm not waiting. I will keep reading...

Cholesterol is healthy and it affects nerve tissue healing. I hope this has been interesting for you.