How does having high cholesterol impact my risk of cardiovascular disease?

How does having high cholesterol impact my risk of cardiovascular disease? Cholesterol is a fatty substance found in the blood. It's produced naturally by the liver and some of it comes from the food that we eat. We do need cholesterol to stay healthy because the cells in our body use it. There are two types of cholesterol. One is called high density lipoprotein or HDL and we call this good cholesterol and this is because it gets rid of bad cholesterol from your blood. It takes that cholesterol that you don't need and takes it to the liver which breaks down that bad cholesterol and can get rid of it from your body. The second type of cholesterol is called non-HDL cholesterol and this is bad and this is because this type of cholesterol when there's too much of it, can build up inside the walls of the blood vessels, particularly the arteries. And when this happens the arteries can become clogged up and narrowed and this increases your risk of various cardiovascular diseases. The main ones that we try to prevent are major illnesses such as having a heart attack or a stroke. But because the cloggy sort of fatty deposits can build up in multiple areas of the body having high cholesterol means that it is more that having high cholesterol puts you at greater risk of developing problems in other organs such as the kidneys the eyes or the brain.