I have heard people say that they want to lower their cholesterol levels in order to lose weight. The reason for decreasing your cholesterol levels is not because you would like to lose weight. That is putting the cart before the horse. You almost certainly just have a few grammes of cholesterol in your body, so lowering that amount is not going to help you look any trimmer.
The reason for losing weight can include wanting to reduce your cholesterol levels; it can also include wanting to reduce your blood pressure; it can include wanting to take weight off your knees and it can include wanting to look healthier.
But there are a number of other reasons too: losing weight will increase your general feeling of well-being, making you feel better and happier in general and lower your likelihood of developing diabetes.
This piece is concerned with cholesterol and how to reduce the amount of cholesterol in your blood. So, first of all, what is cholesterol? The first thing to do is clear up the misapprehension that all cholesterol is harmful. It is not. There are two kinds of cholesterol: LDL cholesterol is not good for you for certain, but HDL cholesterol is good for you because it helps mop up LDL.
In fact, not all LDL is bad either, your body requires some LDL to produce bile, vitamin D and maintain the right balance of hormones, especially in women. So LDL gets a very bad press, but it is not a total villain. The concerns start when you have excess. It is like guests at a party, you have to have some, but too many and there are issues.
If you have too much LDL, it can clog your arteries, causing your heart to have to work more, increasing blood pressure and consequently increasing the danger of kidney failure, strokes and heart attacks.
How do you get too much LDL? Most LDL is taken into our bodies by eating saturated fats (animal fats) and hydrogenated or trans fats (normally discovered in junk food).
HDL picks up our excess LDL and transports it back to the liver where it is dealt with. HDL is to be discovered in nuts, grains, pulses, fish oil and mono-unsaturated or poly-unsaturated fats. Therefore, the strategy in a nutshell is, if you are attempting to lower your LDL level through diet is to eat less animal fat as discovered in red meat and dairy produce and eat more vegetarian food and fish.
In particular, LDL is to be discovered in high quantities in beef, pork, milk, cheese, butter, cream, hamburgers, hot dogs, potato crisps, potato chips, et cetera and HDL is to be discovered in fresh fruit and vegetables, nuts, fish, whole grains, soya et cetera.
There are also a few myths. Some individuals say that eggs, liver and prawns are high in LDL, but the British Heart Foundation says that humans cannot process cholesterol from these foods, so they are safe to eat and others say that coconut is high in LDL as well.
It is hard to find concensus on coconut, but it appears that it raises LDL and HDL, but HDL by a little bit more than it raises LDL. So, not healthy for you if you have high levels of cholesterol, but good if you have low levels.
Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on several topics, but is now concerned with lowering cholesterol without medication. If you want to know more, please visit our site at What Foods Lower Cholesterol?
