Cholesterol - the good, the bad and the combined - is essential for our overall health.
It plays a key role in digesting fatty foods, making vitamin D and producing hormones amongst other things. But in too high quantities, it can become a serious risk factor for cardiovascular diseases, including heart attacks and stroke. Yet the NHS estimates that almost 60 per cent of adults in the UK have high cholesterol and as it’s mostly without symptoms, many of those people don’t know. If you’re aged over 40, your GP can check cholesterol with a simple blood test, but at-home testing kits that reveal results in minutes or those where blood is collected in a vial and mailed off to be professionally lab-tested offer a convenient alternative.
