How To Decrease Cholesterol

Ways To Lower Cholesterol Naturally

More and more people are looking for ways to lower cholesterol naturally, even though most popular cholesterol lowering medications have a good safety track record.

But some people don't understand how to decrease cholesterol without the help of high cholesterol drugs. The goal of this article is to help those people.

One of the first steps is to decide what to eat when you have high cholesterol. This means eating low fat low cholesterol foods. These have little or no saturated fats and trans fats. Focus on foods like

• fish,
• fruits and vegetables,
• nuts (particularly walnuts and almonds), and
• grains, oatmeal and bran.

Also learn about foods with added stanols. Stanols are substances that occur naturally in small amounts in the plant world. You find them in many grains, vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, and seeds. Recently, many food manufacturers have started adding them to their products.

Aerobic exercise, including just walking more throughout the day, can help lower your LDL (low density lipoproteins) too, and can also help you remove extra weight that may be contributing to your heart disease risk. Exercise helps pump more blood through your circulatory system, which "washes" out some of the LDL cholesterol that may be sticking to the walls of your blood vessels.

Weight loss is an important way to lower LDL (bad cholesterol) and and raise HDL (high density lipoproteins or "good" cholesterol).

A proper exercise routine can help with weight loss, and all of these activities combined can have a very significant effect in lowering your risk of heart disease and stroke.

If your lifestyle changes do not lower your cholesterol significantly, or you have other risk factors, your doctor may choose to prescribe cholesterol medications. The most prescribed medications, known as statins, block the effects of an enzyme that creates cholesterol. Other medications may be used, as well, depending on your particular situation. 

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