Thursday, December 6, 2007

Foods that lower cholesterol

High blood cholesterol problem may lead to the critical complications such as cardiac problems that may be proven fatal in the due course of time. You may have high blood cholesterol due to several reasons. You may control some of the factors, but some of them you can’t also. You may control your lifestyle, which is known as one of the most significant factor leading to high blood cholesterol. However, it is commonly found that people going through a perfectly healthy lifestyle may suffer from high blood cholesterol. The major factor playing its role here may not be the lifestyle then, but something else such as heredity. Heredity is known to be one of the most significant factors influencing cholesterol in our blood stream. Normally, our body produces a certain amount of cholesterol. The individuals, who are predisposed with the risk for high blood cholesterol problem, can only depend on medications as prescribed by expert health practitioners. Of course, they need to maintain their lifestyle as well. But these are not everything. You need to have a full balanced diet comprising of healthy foods that lower cholesterol. This will certainly help you to go through a cholesterol-busting dietary journey.

Prior selecting healthy foods that lower cholesterol, you need to work on some important factors such as weight management. Let us explore some of them.

Loose weight: You need to check your body weight regularly. If your weight is increasing, you should better be careful before it’s going too worse. If you find yourself overweight, take the appropriate measure immediately to loose your weight.

Stay active: Assume a hypothetical situation that you work for 8 hours long sitting in front of the computer, and then you come back and take a nap for some time, have your dinner and then go to bed for sleep, you are in danger. You are in high risk for having several complications like cholesterol. Even doing some simple exercises such as walking for an hour daily can help you to manage your cholesterol level. If you can include exercise in your daily schedule, it means you are on your way to manage level of triglyceride and blood pressure.

Avoid fat: You should always depend on foods that lower cholesterol and avoid taking food that includes saturated fat, trans fat, and cholesterol. You can either completely eliminate these elements from your diet or you may at least minimize the consumption of the same.

Good Food

Now switch your diet to good foods that lower cholesterol. If you are having high blood cholesterol or if you are highly susceptible about having the same, the first thing doctor will suggest you to undergo through food high in soluble fiber. Soluble fiber particularly helps managing your high cholesterol by absorbing it and then extracting it out of the body throughout the digestive system. Apples, blackberries, oranges, apricots, peas, beans, broccoli, grapefruit and sweet potato are known to be the good source of soluble fiber.

Next that comes in line is of course omega 3 fatty acids. These are well-respected foods that lower cholesterol up to a significant level. You can have mackerel, salmon, sardines and many others in your daily diet to fulfill the demand for omega 3 fatty acids in your system. Omega 3 fatty acids also help minimizing cardiovascular problems. If you do not like to take so much fatty fishes, you can always depend on substitute foods that lower cholesterol such as walnuts, soybeans and ground flax.

Besides that, you may add sterols in your healthy diet. Sterols are nutritional substances that you may find in nature. Typically, it is found in the plant cell membranes. Pistachio nuts, sunflower seeds and wheat germ contain high volume of sterols. Sterols actually resemble the chemical structuring almost similar to cholesterol. If you take sterol in your diet, it contends cholesterol for accessing receptors located in the small intestines. Thus it minimizes the production of cholesterol by effectively blocking its access to the small intestines. Hence it results in effective management of cholesterol level in the body.

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