How to Reduce Cholesterol With Diet and Exercise

October 10, 2009 by · 6 Comments
Filed under: Health 

Learning how to reduce cholesterol can be the difference between living a long and healthy life or suffering from a multitude of life threatening diseases that include coronary artery disease, heart disease, blood clots, and stroke. In fact if you are unfortunate enough to visit the doctor and receive a high cholesterol test result your doctor will tell you much the same thing and will recommend that you begin a diet and exercise program to help get it under control and back to normal.

The most important step when it comes to reducing cholesterol is diet. What you eat and how it is prepared has a big impact on blood cholesterol levels, and the thing that affects it the most is not what you may think. There was a time when a low cholesterol diet meant avoiding any food that had cholesterol in it. This made for a limited diet that many people just didn’t want to follow because all sources of food derived from animals has cholesterol in it.

Medical research now tells us that this isn’t necessarily true. Cholesterol found in food doesn’t easily find its way into the human circulatory system. The biggest factors that raise blood levels are in fact saturated fat and trans fat. By cutting these two forms of fat out of the daily diet we can reduce blood cholesterol significantly.

This is why the way we select and prepare our food is so important. By choosing lean and low fat foods we have won half the battle. But once we get our groceries home and start cooking many times we sabotage our efforts at the grocery store. Cooking, or frying, our foods in vegetable oils and margarine or butter high in saturated and trans fats loads up these low fat foods with more fat. Poultry and fish are two great choices in a low cholesterol diet, that is until we batter them and lower them into a pot of hot oil.

Learning to read labels becomes an important skill in the fight against high cholesterol. Not only are lean cuts of meat a good way to go but when it comes to dairy it is important to make the switch to low fat items. Whole milk needs to be replaced with one-percent or skim milk. Dairy has many nutrients we need so completely cutting it from the diet is not a good idea, but luckily the low fat versions are full of the same vitamins and minerals.

Exercise is another important part of reducing cholesterol. Joining a gym is not necessary, but some form of physical activity is. This can be as simple as going for a thirty minute walk every day or at least every other day. Exercise also has other health benefits that are hard to beat, all of which lead to a healthier you.

Diet and exercise are the first line of defense in the fight against high cholesterol. Because of the lifestyle the majority of people live these days health issues are going to continue to become and increasing problem in the coming years. A few simple changes with diet and exercise could go a long way towards changing this, particularly when we want to reduce cholesterol levels as a way to a more healthy life.

Andrew Bicknell

http://www.articlesbase.com/nutrition-articles/how-to-reduce-cholesterol-with-diet-and-exercise-742552.html

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