How to Lower Your Cholesterol By Changing Your Diet

How to Lower Your Cholesterol By Changing Your Diet

If you have just been told that your cholesterol levels are high, you will almost certainly be weighing out the choices that your doctor gave you. One alternative would be to take medication and the other alternative would be to modify your diet and carry out more exercise. The changes in diet are not radical, yet they could have a big impact. Exercising may be more of a problem to most people who lead an inactive lifestyle.

Individuals talk about cholesterol levels because there are two kinds of cholesterol. The two levels are HDL (good cholesterol) and LDL (bad cholesterol). LDL comes from animal fats (saturated fats), which are predominant in red meat and full-fat dairy products like milk, butter, cream and cheese but it also is present in hydrogenated trans fats, which are common in margarines, pastry and crisps.

The first thing to do is attempt to cut out saturated fats by switching to chicken and drinking skimmed milk. You could also replace the margarine or butter with one of the cholesterol-decreasing margarines in the supermarkets. Just taking these two steps will make a huge difference to numerous people, however, others might have to go a little further.

Grains are very useful in the battle against cholesterol, because of the amount of fibre in them. Therefore, you could give up your traditional English breakfast of cereals with milk followed by sausage, bacon, eggs and fried bread and instead eat Scots porridge oats with water or skimmed milk followed by granary toast and cholesterol-reducing margarine. This step alone will also considerably alter your cholesterol levels.

If you like a steak for lunch sometimes, you may not have to give it up entirely, but if you normally order an eight ounce steak, get a four or six ounce one instead and if you have that four times a week, cut back to two instead. Replace the steak with meals of skinless chicken and fish. Omega 3 fish oil is considered to be a big ally in the battle against cholesterol.

If you consume a lot of junk food like greasy hamburgers and oily hot dogs, you will almost certainly have to give them up, but that is not a bad thing anyway. Strive to snack on citrus fruits as they are also your friends against LDL cholesterol.

It is not all doom and gloom on the dietary front for sufferers of cholesterol issues. The alterations that will be recommended to you to sort out your cholesterol problems have probably already been suggested to you to sort out being over weight or having high blood pressure or even suffering from diabetes.

They are fundamental, sensible minor lifestyle changes which will have a enormous effect on several aspects of your body. The same is true of exercise. Most people know that they ought to exercise more, it is just a pity that most of us have to have such a serious incentive before we do anything about it.