Natural Diet For Lowering High Cholesterol

You look fit and feel good. You certainly don't have heart problems. That's great. But don't be deceived into thinking your cholesterol levels are fine. The facts say otherwise. In fact over 50% of Americans are listed as having borderline high cholesterol levels. And over 25% of adults over 20 have levels that are high. Like most people, you probably need a diet for lowering high cholesterol. This doesn't mean you need to take medications or anything like that. In fact, in can easily be done naturally.

Look at your diet. If you're typical of people in this country, it probably has a lot of fatty meats, fried foods, eggs, dairy products, cookies, cakes and more. If this is you, you may not have high cholesterol yet, but you are certainly headed down this road. Yes there are people who can eat all this and more and still not worry about cholesterol, but those people are few and far between.

Your body naturally makes all the cholesterol it requires. You don't need to eat any. Of course eliminating it from your diet is unrealistic, and unnecessary as well. One of two things will happen to the extra that you eat. It will either be eliminated, or it will simply sit in your arteries. What you want to avoid is the latter of the two.

But keeping this in perspective, just because your cholesterol is a little high doesn't mean you'll go in to cardiac arrest tonight. But do keep in mind that high cholesterol is one of the key risk factors for a heart attack. So even if your levels are normal, it's probably a wise idea to take the necessary steps to keep them there. This is actually fairly simple since a diet for lowering high cholesterol usually means just a few changes.

And no, the first change is not eliminating cholesterol from your diet. Actually, the cholesterol you eat is usually not the problem. The real problem is saturated fat. And in most cases this comes from animal products. Not just fatty meat, but things like cheese, butter, ice cream, milk and lard are also full of saturated fat. Vegetable oils can also be problematic. And these slip into your diet unknowingly in things like baked goods, creamers and even non dairy whipped toppings. A simple check of the food label will tell you whether what you are eating is full of saturated fat.

We did say that eating cholesterol is typically not the problem. That doesn't mean you have complete freedom to go wild here. Too much is still no good. That means take it easy on things like organ meats (think liver) and egg yolks. One yolk has over 200 mg of cholesterol.

So how do we get the levels down or at least maintain them. Believe it or not the answer again lies in fats. Both polyunsaturated and mono unsaturated fats will actually reduce the cholesterol levels in your blood. You can get polyunsaturated fats from plants, vegetables and some nuts. Things like cottonseed, corn, safflower and soybean can actually lower your levels. So can things like sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, walnuts and pecans. All of them have plenty of polyunsaturated fats.

As for mono unsaturated fats, look to things like olive oil. This has actually been proven to drop your blood pressure as well. Add olive oil, remove or decrease saturated fats, and you have a natural diet for lowering high cholesterol.