If you are looking for ways to lower your cholesterol through lifestyle, this is what the research says:
First look at your risk factors for cardiovascular disease. The higher your risks, the more aggressive you will want to be.
I am providing a link to the American College of cardiology cardiovascular risk calculator. If you know your cholesterol levels and your blood pressure numbers, you can enter the information and come up with an interpretation of your current risk. If you have questions about it after doing so you should probably discuss it with your healthcare provider. High-risk individuals may want to consider being on a statin medication. Lower risk individuals may want to try lifestyle measures to reduce their cardiovascular disease risk.
There are five general things that you can do lifestyle-wise to reduce your risk. If you can’t do all five of these, but you can do a few of them, do what you can. Each one will deliver some degree of risk reduction and as you layer them, you will accumulate greater risk reduction.
- Reduce saturated fat in your diet. The recommendation is to reduce it to less than 10% of your total calorie consumption for the day so you’ll need to be tracking your intake. What are the biggest sources of saturated fat in your diet? Cheese, sausage, hotdogs, and milk.
- Add healthy fats to your diet. Despite all of the hate directed toward seed oils, the evidence demonstrates that both mono and poly unsaturated fats when used to replace saturated fats like butter or lard for cooking can lower your LDL cholesterol. So, this means olive oil is good as well as canola, corn, and soybean.
- Add Soluble fiber to your diet, either from food sources or you could take a fiber supplement like Metamucil. Food sources of soluble fiber would be from grains like barley and oats and also other fruits like apples and pears and vegetables like avocados and turnips.
- Switch up your Macronutrients so that you’re eating fewer carbohydrates and more protein. Some simple ways to do this would be to limit your carbs per meal to fewer than 20 grams or to limit your daily total to fewer than 100 grams of carbs. Sometimes it is easier to think of planning one or two meals of the day that do not include any starchy foods. For example, a breakfast of eggs and bacon, without the toast or cereal would be a low-carb way to start the day. If you also had a lunch that was a salad with meat and vegetables on it and skipped the croutons, bread or crackers, you would have easily cut down on your daily carbs. Dinner in this example could be more ‘normal’ and include a starchy vegetable like potato.
- Lose weight. Easier said than done, but getting to a healthier weight will also improve your cholesterol numbers.
Each lifestyle change you can make may lower your LDL cholesterol by 3-5%. Cumulative risk reduction could be as great as 25% if you can do all of them! And, the longer you go with lower risk, the greater the long-term impact. So, start now to lower your cardiovascular disease risk!