Top Five Tips to Reducing Cholesterol
Many a myth floats around about the right and wrong foods to eat to lower cholesterol. Eggs and prawns were demonised for years as a major contributor to high cholesterol but the times have changed and a great deal of research has been done in the meantime. Just as much as we know there are foods that can cause our cholesterol to increase, there are foods that can reduce our cholesterol too. So here are the top ten tips that you can do to help reduce your cholesterol:
1. Include these foods regularly in your diet:
Soluble fibre - Found in foods such as wholegrains, oats, barley and some vegetables like eggplant, okra and legumes, soluble fibre binds to cholesterol in the gut and remove it from the body before it can be absorbed into the blood stream.
Nuts - Eating a small handful of nuts per day has been shown to lower ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol.
Fruits – particularly apples, strawberries and citrus fruits because they contain pectin, a specific type of soluble fibre that has been shown to help reduce that LDL cholesterol.
Oily fish - such as salmon, trout, sardines and tuna contain omega 3 fatty acids that can also help to lower LDL cholesterol and triglycerides and because a fish meal will often replace a red meat meal, this means you’re eating less saturated fats.
2. Use plant sterols & stanols
These plant chemicals are found naturally in small doses in plant gums but they’ve been highly concentrated and added to foods that’d typically be high in saturated fats such as butter, milk and cheese and have been shown to reduce LDL cholesterol by up to 10%.
3. Keep these foods to a minimum in your diet
Saturated fats – these are fats found in land animals, in particular in fatty cuts of red meat, the skin of poultry, processed meats like sausages and salami, full fat dairy products like butter, cream, cheese, milk and yoghurt and anything made from them such as cakes, biscuits, pastries, ice cream as well as coconut and palm oils.
Trans fats – these fats are chemically created in a process that adds hydrogen to liquid vegetable oils, which makes them solid such as with margarine. The recommendation is not just a little but NONE in the diet as it not only has no nutritional value but it can be that harmful to our health by reducing ‘good’ HDL cholesterols levels and raising triglycerides and LDL cholesterol.
Eggs – so rich in nutrients, it’s not necessary to completely eliminate eggs from you diet but stick to 4-6 yolks per week, which is the part that contains the dietary cholesterol and enjoy egg whites freely.
Shellfish – like eggs, these crustaceans are super nutritious but if you’re trying to reduce your cholesterol, stick to the recommendation of just once per week for prawns, lobster and crab.
4. Keep a healthy weight
Excess weight has been shown to increase the levels of fats circulating in our blood and can increase triglycerides, LDL cholesterol and reduce heart-protective HDL cholesterol.
5. Be active regularly
Exercising and just generally being active in combination with a cholesterol-lowering diet can have the reverse effect of being overweight and enhance the benefits of a cholesterol-lowering diet by boosting healthy HDL cholesterol and reducing harmful LDL cholesterol.