September 24, 2017　=========

☆  cholesterol  コレステロール

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I’m interested to know why today’s word is in Katakana, and not a Japanese word. Do you know why? I always thought that Katakana words were borrowed from other languages, and an equivalent word didn’t exist in Japanese. Is that true for this word? If so, does that mean that cholesterol is actually a Western problem??

If so, why aren’t we all eating a traditional Japanese diet, and avoiding the heart disease problems related to high levels of bad cholesterol? I could find some research about Japanese cholesterol levels compared to other countries, but none of them were recent. They were from the 80’s and 90’s and the research did find that Japanese people had quite low cholesterol levels, and low levels of heart disease thanks to this. Some research said it might be genetic, others said it might be due to the large amount of fish in the Japanese diet.

Is this still true? Are cholesterol levels in Japan still low? If so, I might start eating more fish!!

Bye,

Chris