Cholesterol And Your Menu

Living Healthy To Fight High Cholesterol

Unfortunately, the medical community is quick to prescribe another expensive medication to lower cholesterol but they are far less likely to suggest herbal or homeopathic measures.

Along with getting plenty of fiber there are foods that will help in promoting the lowering of cholesterol as well as herbs that can further reduce cholesterol.

Foods containing pectin are advantageous to lowering cholesterol levels. Carrots, apples and the white layer inside of citrus rinds are particularly beneficial.

Avocado, which is very high in fat, has unexpectedly become a cholesterol reducer. A study of women who were given a choice of a high monounsaturated fats (olive oil) along with avocado diet or a complex carbohydrate consisting of starches and sugars reported interesting results. In six weeks, the former group on the olive oil and avocado diet showed an 8.2 percent reduction in cholesterol.

Beans. Gotta love ‘em. They are high in fiber and low in cholesterol. What more could you ask for! A cup and a half of beans, or the amount in a bowl of soup, can lower total cholesterol levels by as much as 19 percent!

Garlic. We discussed garlic earlier but it is well worth repeating here. Use it liberally in your diet. Not only will it help to lower your cholesterol it is also credited with lowering blood pressure. Be sure you include generous amounts of garlic as well as onions in your daily diet.

Cayenne pepper (capsicum minimum) and other plants that contain the phenolic compound capsaicin have a well demonstrated effect in lowering blood cholesterol levels, as does the widely used spice Fenugreek.

Caraway is another aromatic spice with demonstrable cholesterol lowering properties. A whole range of Asian herbal remedies new to western medicine are proving to be valuable in this field. Remember when the “low-fat” mantra began?

We all jumped in with both feet and some of us still live on low fat foods, like having a baked potato but no butter or sour cream. Maybe you eat pasta, veggies and fat free desserts. So how come you still gain weight?

Good question. Researchers from the National Center for Health Statistics studied the eating habits of 8.260 adult Americans between 1988 and 1991. They found that Americans have significantly reduced their fat intake but still packed on extra pounds in recent years.

In fact, a national health and nutrition survey of over 8,000 American adults concludes that one third of the population is overweight.

The answer is very simple and right in front of us. So many of us jumped on the low fat diet and assumed that if it’s low fat it can’t make us fat. Right? Wrong. We were so involved with the low fat concept that we forgot to count calories!

If you are eating more calories that your body needs, whether from fat or carbohydrates, the body will store them as fat and therefore raise cholesterol levels. Period.

According to an National Institutes of Health study, by 1990 the average American was consuming hundreds more calories a day than he was consuming 10 years before.

There are researchers who believe that eating small amounts of fat can keep you from overindulging on total calories. Ohio State University nutrition scientist John Allred points out that dietary fat causes our bodies to produce a hormone that tells our intestines to slow down the emptying process.

We feel full and are less likely to overeat. Add a little bit of peanut butter to your piece of fruit and it can help to keep you from a binge later.

Here is another trap to avoid. Reducing fat might not be as smart as it sounds. Tufts University scientists recently put 11 middle-aged men and women volunteers on a variety of average reduced and low fat diets. The results were astounding.

Very low fat diets which provided only 15 percent of fat from calories did have a positive effect on blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels. By the way, that diet is so strict there is no way it could be duplicated in real life.

But a reduced fat diet, which is more realistic, only affected those levels if accompanied by weight loss. Not only that, they concluded that cutting fat without losing weight actually affected cholesterol through increasing triglyceride levels and decreasing HDL!

So while excess fat is not healthy, it isn’t a dirty word either. Without some fat in our diets, our bodies could not make nerve cells and hormones or absorb fat soluble vitamins.

If obesity is one of your high cholesterol causes, try losing a pound a week with a 500 calorie solution. No, we aren’t going to ask you to only eat 500 calories a week! What you can do is easily lose a pound a week just by cutting 500 calories a day out of your diet.

You can easily burn 250 of them just be spending about 30 minutes of aerobic exercise, like bicycling, dancing or just walking. To get rid of the other 250 try cutting out mayonnaise, doughnuts and alcohol. If there were no other reason to take control of cholesterol, here’s one that certainly has merit.

A recent study found that men with high cholesterol are twice as likely to be impotent as men whose cholesterol levels are normal or low. Researchers recorded cholesterol levels of 3,250 healthy men between the ages of 25 and 83.

Men with total cholesterol higher than 240 milligrams/dl were twice as likely to have trouble achieving or maintaining an erection than men who cholesterol levels were below 180 milligrams/dl.

Men who had low levels of HDL were also twice as likely to suffer from impotence. The same high cholesterol, high-fat diet that narrows arteries and blocks blood flow to your heart also narrows the arteries that carry blood to your penis.

Blood has to be able to get to your penis in order for you to have an erection. Take control now and you’ll find yourself improving in this area of your life as well.

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