10 Steps to Lower Your Cholesterol

The risk of high cholesterol

High blood cholesterol is one of the main risk factors for heart disease, along with smoking, high blood pressure, carrying excess weight, family history and a sedentary lifestyle. So it pays to have your doctor check your cholesterol regularly (particularly if you're over 50) and look at ways to keep it down.

Meat Loaf

High cholesterol is usually defined as over 5.5 millimoles per litre (mmol/L).

However if you already have heart problems or have one or more risk factors, your doctor may prefer to keep it lower at 4.5 mmol/L or less. You need to discuss any blood tests with your doctor to work out the best course of action for you.

10 steps to lower your cholesterol

Here are 10 steps to help reduce your blood cholesterol if it's high. They are listed in order of priority with the most important steps at the top.

1. Maintain a healthy weight. Often just losing excess weight if you're overweight will automatically bring your cholesterol down.
2. Steer clear of saturated and trans fats. These are the 'bad' fats that raise cholesterol. You'll find them in fried fast foods, salty snack foods, commercial pies, pastries and biscuits, fatty meat, deli meats (salami, bacon, sausages), chips, fries and doughnuts.
3. Eat small quantities of 'good' fats which are monounsaturated and polyunsaturated. These are found in oils, soft spreads/margarines, nuts, seeds and avocado. Allow 1-2 tablespoons of oil for cooking and salads plus 1 tablespoon spread/margarine a day.
4. Eat 3 serves of sterol-enriched foods each day. Currently there are spreads (Logicol, Proactiv), milk and yoghurt (Heart Active).
5. Eat a handful of nuts (30-50g) a day, preferably unsalted.
6. Eat plenty of soluble fibre in oats, barley, psyllium and legumes (beans, peas). This can sweep cholesterol out of the body via the bowel.
7. Eat generous serves of vegetables and fruits for their antioxidants. Aim for at least 5 serves of vegetables and 2 serves of fruit a day. Red wine, tea and dark chocolate also add antioxidants, but you don't need heaps of these, 1-2 serves is ok.
8. Buy 'whole grains' whenever you can. Shop for grainy bread, muesli, oat cereals, cereals marked 'whole grain', and brown rice.
9. Swap to low-fat or skim milk and yoghurt. Buy reduced-fat cheese or use cottage/farm cheese.
10. Limit cholesterol-rich foods such as liver, kidney, brains, egg yolks, prawns and calamari (squid). You can eat them twice a week and make sure they're cooked in a good oil. For most people, eggs are the food they miss most, so it pays to find egg replacers or recipes that don't use eggs as binders (meat loaf or muffins).

10 Steps to Lower Your Cholesterol

Catherine Saxelby is a dietician and nutritionist who writes articles on health and well being for Australian health insurance provider ahm. She regularly provides healthy eating and nutrition advice for people looking for health insurance and health cover.

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High Cholesterol Food List

Assembling Your Own High Cholesterol Food List

Fighting unhealthy cholesterol means putting together your own personal high cholesterol food list. Doing so will allow you to keep in mind the foods you should eliminate from your diet, or at least limit a great deal. Here are some tips on how to structure your list, so that it will provide you with the greatest benefit.

Meat Loaf

Your first step in preparing an effective list of high cholesterol foods is to jot down all the foods your doctor has told you to cut down on or avoid altogether. You will find that as you scan the listing, some of the foods are items that you consume on a regular basis. In organizing your own list, prioritize the items by creating three categories. The first category should contain all your favorites that you need to cut down on or eliminate from your daily diet. As an example, perhaps your physician has told you to cut way down on your red meat consumption.

In this first category, you may include such things as hamburgers, meat loaf, or pasta dishes made with red meat such as spaghetti with meatballs or a meat sauce. In the second category, include foods that you may have a few times a week, but that you can do without. For instance, candy bars are not the best thing to eat when you have high cholesterol. If you are in the habit of having a couple of candy bars during the course of the week, add them into the secondary category. For your third category, list those items your doctor wants you to avoid that rarely cross your lips anyway. Even though they are not part of your usual diet, you still need to be aware of them as something to avoid.

Categories help you to remind yourself that a particular food is not in your best interests. While it may seem like a big self-sacrifice, you can make one more addition to your list that will help take some of the sting out of the process. Along with foods to avoid, make a list of things you can have in the place of the now forbidden items. Being able to look at the list and say to yourself "I can't have that double-decker bacon cheese burger and the belly buster order of fries, but I can have a chicken breast seasoned with cayenne pepper on whole wheat with lettuce and tomato, as well as a baked potato with low fat sour cream," will take quite a bit of the sting out of changing your eating habits.

Providing yourself with a personalized visual inventory of what you should and should not be eating can make the process much easier. Why not start putting together your own customized high cholesterol food list today? And while you are at it why not begin to make substitutions from the high cholesterol list to a low cholesterol list. You will definitely find some great substitutions and be surprised how easy it is to make the changes in your diet and life style.

High Cholesterol Food List

Jim Ott is a retired RN and Hospital Administrator and can be found at his website. http://www.bestcholesterolsite.tapwaterforgas.com

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High Cholesterol Food List

Assembling Your Own High Cholesterol Food List

Fighting unhealthy cholesterol means putting together your own personal high cholesterol food list. Doing so will allow you to keep in mind the foods you should eliminate from your diet, or at least limit a great deal. Here are some tips on how to structure your list, so that it will provide you with the greatest benefit.

Your first step in preparing an effective list of high cholesterol foods is to jot down all the foods your doctor has told you to cut down on or avoid altogether. You will find that as you scan the listing, some of the foods are items that you consume on a regular basis. In organizing your own list, prioritize the items by creating three categories. The first category should contain all your favorites that you need to cut down on or eliminate from your daily diet. As an example, perhaps your physician has told you to cut way down on your red meat consumption.

In this first category, you may include such things as hamburgers, meat loaf, or pasta dishes made with red meat such as spaghetti with meatballs or a meat sauce. In the second category, include foods that you may have a few times a week, but that you can do without. For instance, candy bars are not the best thing to eat when you have high cholesterol. If you are in the habit of having a couple of candy bars during the course of the week, add them into the secondary category. For your third category, list those items your doctor wants you to avoid that rarely cross your lips anyway. Even though they are not part of your usual diet, you still need to be aware of them as something to avoid.

Categories help you to remind yourself that a particular food is not in your best interests. While it may seem like a big self-sacrifice, you can make one more addition to your list that will help take some of the sting out of the process. Along with foods to avoid, make a list of things you can have in the place of the now forbidden items. Being able to look at the list and say to yourself "I can't have that double-decker bacon cheese burger and the belly buster order of fries, but I can have a chicken breast seasoned with cayenne pepper on whole wheat with lettuce and tomato, as well as a baked potato with low fat sour cream," will take quite a bit of the sting out of changing your eating habits.

Providing yourself with a personalized visual inventory of what you should and should not be eating can make the process much easier. Why not start putting together your own customized high cholesterol food list today? And while you are at it why not begin to make substitutions from the high cholesterol list to a low cholesterol list. You will definitely find some great substitutions and be surprised how easy it is to make the changes in your diet and life style.

Jim Ott is a retired RN and Hospital Administrator and can be found at his website. http://www.bestcholesterolsite.tapwaterforgas.com

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Simplifying Cholesterol - Fooled Again!

Most of us over a certain age realize that if we allow arterial plaque to buildup in our arteries we putting ourselves at serious risk for heart attack or stroke. But yet heart attack and stroke always rank in the top 5 when it comes to causes of death, far outpacing a condition like diabetes and nosing out many types of cancer.

So if we know arterial plaque accumulation in our arteries is a killer, and cholesterol is its primary building block, why are so many of us still falling victim?

Meat Loaf

Certainly the foods we consume have to be at the top of the list but it is not always from lack of trying to eat a heart healthy diet. Sure sometimes we fall off of the old heart healthy wagon and consume foods we shouldn't. But more often than not I believe it is a case of trying to eat healthy and either not paying attention to labels or just being fooled.

That's right fooled! And believe me getting fooled is not all this hard, especially if the item is on sale or gives the impression that it might be healthy.

Some quick facts

Generally speaking to actually reverse existing arterial and cholesterol deposits one needs to only get about 7 percent (16 grams) of their daily calories from saturated fat. Cholesterol should be held down to no more than 200 milligrams per day. But it is saturated fat that seems to boost cholesterol and blood fat levels more than anything else.

Back to our article

Now let's move on to how we might get snookered even though we might be trying to do all the right things. I will be using myself as an example.

As you may know trying to find a healthy solution that everyone likes can be quite challenging at times. Nevertheless, there are many low cholesterol options that have duel advantages. For instance salmon and tuna are both low in saturated fat and cholesterol. Research tells us that not only do these heart healthy food not raise cholesterol levels but may actually reduce instead. Many fruits, vegetables, and whole grains such as broccoli, beans, fruit pulp, flax, oats, and apples also have duel advantages.

I always try to buy some of the above options on my weekly shopping trip but the truth of the matter is that fish and vegetables can get a little boring after a while causing me to look for other healthy options at a reasonable price.

This was the case on my last shopping trip when I spotted ground turkey on sale. I thought that would be perfect for the heart healthy meat loaf I have been planning to make. After all the label clearly stated that this 16 oz package contained 50 percent less fat than USDA data for regular ground beef. I also splurged and bought tartar sauce for the fish, and a bag of multigrain chips for snacking.

Let's take each of these three items and see how I did. My sale priced ground turkey contained 26 percent saturated fat, tartar sauce 8 percent, and my chips 6 percent. Neither the chips or the tartar sauce made any claims about having less fat so I knew that I was splurging, but the ground turkey which was giving the impression that it was a heart healthy choice was much worse than the other two combined.

The basic premise of achieving heart healthy blood cholesterol levels is a simple one, and that is to not eat more cholesterol than your body can process. Certainly with the ground turkey in my basket I have violated this simple premise, not because I wanted to but because the labeling caused me to make a bad choice.

There are examples just like this all over your favorite grocery store. The bottom line is if you are going to conquer cholesterol, and reduce your chances of having a heart attack or stroke, paying close attention to labeling is one of the most important aspects, right alongside that of staying active.

Simplifying Cholesterol - Fooled Again!

Rob D. Hawkins is an enthusiastic consumer advocate for natural health and natural living with over 10 years experience in the field.
To learn more about cholesterol along with a list of safe and effective natural cholesterol reduction supplements Click Here

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