We hear a lot about cholesterol in advertisements and television with products proclaiming “no cholesterol” but I doubt most people are aware of exactly what cholesterol is and how it affects our health.

Let me make clear, cholesterol is NOT a bad thing. In fact, cholesterol is an important compound in our body and too low blood levels is also unhealthy. It is a class of compounds that are a combination of fat and hormones (lipid and steroids) that are used in our body to manufacture hormones such as estrogen and testosterone. They are often described as waxy. We could not survive without cholesterol. It is the excess of cholesterol, particularly of the wrong kind that we need to concern ourselves with.

Contrary to what advertising seems to suggest, cutting cholesterol completely out of our diets doesn’t work to cut down blood levels because our liver manufactures 80% of our blood cholesterol and only 20% is from our diet. If we cut consumption too low, our liver will just get busy and make more.

Total cholesterol is the sum of LDL (low density) cholesterol, HDL (high density) cholesterol, VLDL (very low density) cholesterol, and IDL (intermediate density) cholesterol. It is the sum of tese that should not go over 240 mg/dL.

Aside from total cholesterol over 240 mg/dL as being dangerous, we can also have dangerous cholesterol levels if we have too much of the “bad” cholesterol relative to the “good” cholesterol in our blood, which are also known as LDL and HDL.

What is LDL Cholesterol

Low density lipoproteins (LDL) is also called “bad” cholesterol because elevated levels of LDL cholesterol are associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease. LDL deposits on the walls of arteries causing the formation of a hard, thick substance called cholesterol plaque, leading to atherosclerosis and high blood pressure.

High density lipoproteins (HDL), is also called “good” cholesterol, because HDL cholesterol particles prevent atherosclerosis by extracting cholesterol from the artery walls and disposing of them through the liver.

So, high levels of LDL cholesterol and low levels of HDL cholesterol (high LDL/HDL ratios) are unhealthy and put you at risk for heart disease. While the converse, while low levels of LDL cholesterol and high level of HDL cholesterol (low LDL/HDL ratios) will improve your health. The optimal ratio of the two is

There are other types of fat or fatty acids that are found in the blood, including VLDL and Triglycerides. Fatty acids make up fat much like amino acids make up protein. You’ve heard of fatty acids, these are omega-3 and omega-6, the essential fats we need for survival.

Further fat found in the blood stream includes: VLDL (very low density lipoproteins) is similar to LDL cholesterol in that it contains mostly fat and not much protein. Triglycerides, which as the name suggests, is a molecule made up of three fatty acids, are another type of fat that is carried in the blood by very low density lipoproteins. Excess calories, alcohol, or sugar in the body are converted into triglycerides in the liver and stored in fat cells throughout the body.

The major health risk caused by excess cholesterol is mainly related to the circulatory system, where the build up of plaque narrows the blood vessels and stiffens them. This leads to high blood pressure, which can cause a stroke. It can also reduce the level of oxygen-carrying blood that reaches the heart, the heart is affected, often causing chest pain called angina can be the result. If the blood supply to a portion of the heart is completely cut off by total blockage of a coronary artery, the result is a heart attack. This is usually due to a sudden closure from a blood clot forming on top of a previous narrowing.

For total cholesterol, as mentioned above, 240 mg/dL is the danger level but less than 200 mg/dl is optimal, For LDL, 160 mg/dL is the danger level but less than 100 mg/dl is optimal. Finally, a healthy HDL cholesterol level is set above 60 mg/dl, and should be kept above 40 mg/dl for men and above 50 mg/dl for women to prevent excessive LDL accumulation in the blood and along the artery walls. The optimal total to HDL ratio is 3.3 to 1 or less while the optimal LDL to HDL ratio is 1.7 to one or less.

Have you had your cholesterol checked lately?

Other resources on this website explain how to lower cholesterol by diet and lifestyle changes.

One of the major factors that can drive cholesterol levels up is excess body fat.  Excess weight/fat is also a risk factor on its own and can lead to a whole host of other problems, such as diabetes, hormonal problems, strokes, and high blood pressure.  By losing weight you can lower your bad cholesterol and total cholesterol levels, as well as increase your good cholesterol.  But it isn’t just losing “weight”: for example, if you took a diuretic, your body weight would decrease but your health would not be better off.  The goal is to lose body fat.

Loss of body fat happens when your calorie expenditure exceeds your calorie intake.  Ideally, you don’t want too large of a deficit causing your body to go into “starvation” mode, meaning it releases hormones that causes undue hunger.  Going too low fat, too high carb, too low carb, and too few caloaries are not optimal ways to drop body fat.  Too low fat with too high carbohydrate can actually adversely affect your cholesterol levels!

Best is to eat 4 to 5 small balanced meals a day (to keep blood sugar steady) and to increase calorie expenditure by walking, biking, swimming or other sports.  My personal choice is weight training, stair climbing and walks.  At age 58, I am able to maintain a low body fat while I’m able to eat enough to be satisfied.

This brings up another super method for increasing the ratio of “good” to “bad” cholesterol: Exercise.  This is one of the best things you can do for your health.  Exercise not only reduces cholesterol, body fat, and blood pressure, it also helps keep your bones strong and calcified, keeps muscle mass up which increases metabolism, and boosts mood.

Exercise should be fun, not torture.    I often walk with my daughter, partner, or sister.  It becomes a nice social activity.  One could ride bikes, hike, horseback ride, play golf, garden, walk at the beach or park with family and friends.

Don’t undertake anything until you consult a doctor to make sure you can undertake what you want, especially if you haven’t done anything in a long time.  Don’t go full bore all at once but work into it.  Start with 10 minutes walking, then move up as you adjust.  .I started with very light weights and now lift quite heavy.  It takes time for the muscles and joints to build up enough to handle more strenuous activity, especially if you are over 50.

There are other factors that you do not have control over when it comes to cholesterol: those are age, gender and genetics.  Between exercise, losing fat, and eating a healthy diet, rest and drinking water, you can counteract all the disadvantages.  For more, check out the other articles on this website or sign up for the free e-course on lowering cholesterol.

Food Types that Lower LDL cholesterol

Causes for High Cholesterol

Before you learn what foods/diet lower cholesterol, it is important to understand what can raise it.  It is important because certain serious health problems such as heart disease have been clinically proven to be correlated to high cholesterol levels.  There are several factors that can increase your cholesterol to unhealthy levels, including excess weight, unhealthy habits such as smoking, stress, and eating habits.

Furthermore, excess body fat is not only a risk factor for heart disease on its own, but this condition usually increases your cholesterol as well.   Losing excess body fat can help lower your bad cholesterol and total cholesterol levels, as well as increase your good cholesterol.

Other factors that contribute to risk of high cholesterol levels include level of exercise, age, and gender.

Lastly, your genetics play a role in your cholesterol levels; high cholesterol can run in families.  Rarely, they can be very high that only medication can lower them.  Fortunately this is rare: for most of us, we can make a huge impact on our cholesterol levels by changing some habits, including diet and exercise.  I have some of those unfortunate genetics, but have discovered what I need to do to bring my cholesterol to optimal levels.  I hope I can show you how too.

Diet that Lowers Cholesterol

The best way to improve your cholesterol is to stick to a healthy diet:

1. One that is lower in
   • transfatty acids produced by deep frying foods or found in margarines and packaged foods,
   • lower in non-food items such as chemicals and additives,
   • lower in refined sugars and grains and
   • in certain cases lower in cholesterol.

   By gradually changing your diet to one containing less of the foods that promote heart disease (by 20 to 25%), you can dramatically improve the health of your heart.

2. Replace foods such as trans fat margarines, polyunsaturated oils (that can easily spoil), and deep fried foods, with olive oil, avocados, and fish such as salmon. Use white wine vinegar to keep your pan moist while cooking instead of butter.  It does not change the taste of the food and it is low in cholesterol.  You can also use a cholesterol-free egg substitute instead of whole eggs, or better yet cut down on egg yolks by using eggwhites with one yolk (something I do every morning!).
3. Increase the number of fresh fruits and vegetables (which helps reduce sodium), whole grains, and low to nonfat dairy products as well as increase water consumption, an often overlooked factor in healthy living.  It is simple to do and helps the body rid itself of waste.

Too many people trying to lose body fat go about it using very low fat, high carb diets.  This might work for some that do not have a cholesterol problem but this will actually raise cholesterol in those susceptible to the problem.  This is because excessive carbohydrates at any one meal will raise insulin levels, triggering the body to siphon off excess blood sugar into the liver to make cholesterol and triglycerides (which are used for energy and fat storage).  This increase in blood fats (triglycerides) seems to hand in hand with inflammation and higher cholesterol levels.  I know a number of people whose joints get inflamed with excess carbohydrates, myself included.

Your body will also manufacture its own cholesterol if it is not given enough good fat.  In fact, it will over produce it on very low fat diets. What happens is that your liver will start to produce cholesterol to guarantee your body a baseline level.

Rather then avoiding cholesterol completely, it is important to continue to eat foods that contain good cholesterol.  Your liver only makes 75-80 % of the cholesterol that you need.  The rest of the cholesterol you need comes from your diet

If you decrease the amount of cholesterol that you are eating too much and make up those calories in carbs and sugar, your metabolism goes into famine mode and your liver overproduces cholesterol to make up the difference and stock up.  This overdrive state will not shut off until you start eating cholesterol again.  In truth, a low-cholesterol, high-carbohydrate diet can actually lead to high cholesterol!

So food types that lower LDL cholesterol include healthy fats and not low fat, and healthy carbohydrates such as whole grains, beans, vegetables and fruits, not refined foods.  Keeping blood sugar constant is key.  All this talk about food makes me hungry.  I better go fix myself a meal.

• The first is trans-fatty acids.  These are originally unsaturated fats that have been heat treated, such as margarines, oils that have been used in deep frying, or heat treated to stabilize them on the shelf.  Many packaged food has trans fats in them.  Read the labels, these fats are the most dangerous!  Butter is much healthier than margerine, despite what you’ve been hearing, because it has many good fatty acids not found in other foods.
• The second is saturated fat, that is, fat that is found mostly in foods that come from animals, this includes fat in milk and cheese and the fat in meats.  Some plant-based foods are high in saturated fats, such as coconuts, but coconut fat is shown to be healthy because the fatty acid chains are shorter than those found in animal products.
• The last is dietary cholesterol, which is found in animal products.  Barring heat treated fats, too much saturated fat raises your LDL much more than cholesterol in your diet.  Your liver will make up for too large a deficit of cholesterol in your diet because cholesterol is necessary for survival.

Now that we know what foods can raise cholesterol, let’s talk about some super foods that actually lower cholesterol.

1. Foods, such as nuts, which are high in polyunsaturated fats, help reduce your serum cholesterol: the oil in whole raw nuts is stabilized compared to extracted oils, meaning they are much healthier.  Especially good are walnuts and almonds, but could also include other nuts.There are other benefits of nuts:  walnuts are known to help keep blood vessels healthy decreasing your risk of heart disease.  According to the Food and Drug Administration, eating about a handful (1.5 ounces, or 42.5 grams) a day of most nuts, such as almonds, hazelnuts, peanuts, pecans, some pine nuts, pistachio nuts and walnuts, may reduce your risk of heart disease.  But, this does not include nuts that are salted or coated with sugar.  Plus, make sure that you limit yourself to just a handful because all nuts are high in calories.  Try replacing foods that are high in saturated fat with nuts.  An easy way to this is to add a handful of walnuts or almonds instead of using cheese, meat or croutons in your salad.  Sounds delicious.
2. Foods high in omega-3 fatty acids are important to have in your diet, especially for controlling your cholesterol.  Fatty fish, such as tuna and salmon, have the highest concentrations.  Flax seed is another source.  Not only do they control cholesterol, but help reduce your blood pressure, help relieve arthritis symptoms, and are great for your skin.  For those that have suffered heart attacks, increasing omega-3 fatty acids in their diet helps reduce the risk of sudden death. It is recommended to eat at least two servings of fish a week. The highest levels of omega-3 fatty acids are found in fish like mackerel, lake trout, herring, sardines, albacore tuna, salmon and halibut.  In order to avoid adding unhealthy fat you should bake or grill the fish.  If you do not like fish, you can also get small amounts of omega-3 fatty acids from foods like ground flaxseed.  Or alternatively, take krill oil or cod liver oil caps.
3. Soluble fiber.  Although there is some controversy due to recent reports, 5 to 10 grams or more can make an impact on your LDL as well as your total cholesterol.  Foods high in soluble fiber are also delicious: oatmeal (especially oat bran), apples, bananas, pears, barley, pinto beans and prunes.

So, not only do these top 3 foods lower cholesterol, they are also delicious and can add a lot of variety to your diet. I know that we tend to like routines and favorite foods, me included, but reading things like this inspires me to go out and try new things.  I think I’ll go make some fish with nuts on top tonight.  What about you?

Recent activity on the news and web include recommendations for children and high cholesterol since the report published in Dec 2011 in the Pediatric Journal came out.  The medication companies are coming out big in advertising it because they see a whole new market to hook on statins.

However, if you read through the report, you’ll find all the same recommendations for adults:  eat a prudent diet, exercise, and get enough rest.  They also recommend counseling programs for families to help get everyone involved in a healthy lifestyle.  They absolutely do not suggest medicating anyone under the age of 10.  And those between the ages of 10 and 21, only after other means of lowering cholesterol are unsuccessful.

The one error I’ve seen in the article was that statins only rarely cause side effects.  Of the people that I’ve interviewed, and there are many, nearly all of them had side effects that have decreased the quality of life.  The most heinous of those is the effect on memory and brain function.  This is in part due to the decreased availability of CoQ 10, needed for healthy brain and nerve function.

Giving a medication that TYPICALLY, not rarely, affects the brain function and development to children, whose brains are not fully developed until sometime in their late 20s, is ALARMING.  The best way to keep children healthy is to educate their parents to turn their own health around.

The last thing anyone with children wants is to have their own behavior harm their children.  I know for myself, I did many things no matter how tired I was because I knew it would affect my children’s future, this included making healthier meals and  my own daily exercise.  It worked.  My children, now adults, mimicked my behavior.

The bottom line here is two things: people will skew conclusions of research reports to their benefit; not all statements in research reports is necessarily true; and last let’s not poison our children with medication until we’ve exhausted all possible means to get them healthy without medication.  Modeling and involving them in  healthy behaviors will increase the odds of our children growing up to be healthy adults. My recommendation for children and high cholesterol is to not only educate the children, but also their parents.  We all need help with this problem.

You can find home tests for about $20 at your local drug store.  However, these are not that easy to use because you have to put the right amount of your blood into a little depression and wait just the right amount of time to interpret the test.  It is also not that straightforward, and I’m used to interpreting these kind of results.

The best way is to get a test through your doctor.  It is also important to take the test after fasting for a period of time.  One high calorie meal can skew your test to have too much cholesterol especially if it is carbohydrate heavy and low fat.

There are a number of risk factors for high cholesterol, almost all of which can be counteracted proactively.  These include:

• Inactivity: exercise reduces bad and raises good cholesterol!
• Poor dietary habits: trans- and saturated fat heavy diets will raise cholesterol for most people.  Eating infrequent large meals.
• Smoking (and possibly drinking).
• Obesity
• Age : could have to do with activity level and obesity, hard to separate but the statistics show as you age, your risk for high cholesterol increases.
• Family history of heart disease and high cholesterol
• Certain diseases or conditions could lead to high cholesterol, especially certain thyroid conditions and diabetes.
• Allergies can set up a negative cycle in the body, particularly inflammation.

Getting your cholesterol level checked is important, even if you are young.  Fifteen to 20% of the US population, irrespective of age, have high cholesterol.  If discovered, it does not mean you’ll have to take medicines the rest of your life.  It does mean you’ll need to consider some changes to your lifestyle or diet.