A high cholesterol level leads to building up of a waxy substance cholesterol plaque in your arteries that obstructs the blood flow. Gradually, it leads a dysfunctional organ and may be a heart attack as well. A planned cholesterol diet is essential to keep it in control. In fact, a minimum level of cholesterol is always required for your body as it helps in repairing cell membrane, and in producing some useful hormones. However, after a certain level, it is dangerous to have high cholesterol level in your body.

Cholesterol Diet
Plan your diet and see what foods can help you lower your cholesterol level. There are some foods that can lower your cholesterol; while others can help it not rising beyond the required level. Generally, you should reduce fat intake and avoid oily and fried foods. Since fats are the main sources of calories, replace the saturated fats intensive diet by natural foods such as fruits and vegetables, and more of complex carbohydrates.

Low Cholesterol Diet
Certain foods are very good for low cholesterol. You should have fish, at least three times in a week. A few kinds of sea fish contain omega-3 fatty acid that helps you lower blood cholesterol. Reduce your fat intake. A low cholesterol diet should include more of complex carbohydrates such as whole grains and potatoes. These are excellent sources of energy and these take care of the benefits that you might miss because of avoiding fats.

While purchasing food items from market that are cooked, baked or roasted, read the label carefully and see there should not be any saturated oils. In addition, have lots of natural fruits, such as fruits or vegetables. These are rich source of fiber that your body requires for many reasons. Apples, carrots, brown rice, barley and legumes form a very good low cholesterol diet. A widely recommended herb psyllium also helps you reduce cholesterol level, if taken daily.

You can also have soya to control cholesterol level in your body. Research has shown that soya milk helps in reducing cholesterol. If possible, have at least 2-3 glasses of soya milk everyday. However, there are a variety of soya sweeteners such as for ice creams or desserts. Read out the sugar content and the amount of calories in those items and select the one that don’t have too many calories.

In true sense, a low cholesterol diet does not require wholesome changes in your diet; rather, it only requires using alternative methods of preparing food. For example, if you are in the habit of having salads, try having potato salad. Cut a few boiled potatoes into thin slices and soak these into plain, low fat yoghurt. Serve these with fresh chive, or even with onions. This is a good low cholesterol diet that is an excellent source of carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals.

High Cholesterol Diet
There is no such defined or standard high cholesterol diet. As long as you take planned diet and take enough of vitamin C, even a diet that is high in cholesterol too is not bad for your body. The problem arises when the excess of cholesterol is not balanced due to lack of vitamin C, or antioxidants. The high cholesterol level leads to arteries’ blockage, and heart related diseases.

If you see that your cholesterol level is higher than required, cut down on fats and oily foods, reduce the sodium content in your meals. A high cholesterol diet usually consists of meats, dairy products and foods that contain hydrogenated or saturated oils. Trans fats are particularly harmful for people who have high cholesterol. Many packed and processed foods that are available at stores contain trans fats or saturated oils, and you should avoid such products for a healthy body.

Even if you are taking required precautions with respect to your diet, ensure to have a decent intake of vitamin C. Have lots ofruits and vegetables as these are generally good antioxidants. Orange, lemon, papaya, cabbage and grapefruit are good sources of vitamin C.

If your doctor says that you should seriously avoid all fats and take minimum of salt, it means that you need to take such food items that have no cholesterol at all. Slowly, a cholesterol free diet helps you neutralize the high cholesterol level in your body. Some of the items that you can take are Orange Juice, Raw Melon, Seedless Raisins, Raw Watermelon, Boiled and Drained Asparagus, Apple, Banana, White Rice, Sweet Potato, Oat Bran, Spinach, Tomato, Cabbage, Cucumber, and Onion to name a few.

Garlic should be integral part of your cholesterol free diet since it is an excellent product for cholesterol control. Research has shown that a clove of garlic for 12 consecutive days starts bringing down the cholesterol level to normal.

The Two Types of Cholesterol
There are two types of cholesterol, one is the good cholesterol known as HDL or high density cholesterol and the other is the bad cholesterol known as LDL or low density cholesterol. The good cholesterol HDL, should be in levels of minimum 40md/dL or more and the bad cholesterol should be less than 200mg/dL.

The bad cholesterol is the cholesterol responsible for causing dieses including clogged arteries and can provoke a coronary heart disease.

What Causes High Cholesterol In Your Body?
High cholesterol level in your body is primarily due to the food products you consume which contain trans fat, saturated fats and cholesterol. This is the major cause of raising cholesterol levels in the blood stream. However, there is more than one cause of high cholesterol. Besides the foods you consume, excess weight, genes, gender and age all can cause high cholesterol levels.

Obesity is one of the major cause of high cholesterol as it occurs when the body mass is mostly made up of fat. Fat in turn, contain cholesterol. That is why, it is important to keep an ideal weight at all times.

Family’s health history transmitted through the genes is also a cause of high cholesterol levels. So, if anyone in your family has suffered from high cholesterol, you may have a tendency to suffer from it too. High cholesterol caused by heredity can be controlled with medication under a doctor’s supervision.

Men are found to be more prone to high levels of cholesterol in their teens while women become more prone to high cholesterol after menopause. Both men and women can control their cholesterol levels and maintain a normal level of cholesterol with proper health care and diet and with the right medication.

How To Prevent High Cholesterol
As most of the causes of high cholesterol are our own negligence in our diet and physical activities, we could easily manage our cholesterol level by modifying our diet and daily activities. We should pay more attention to the food we consume everyday and the amount of exercise we do everyday. This will help prevent and improve the levels of bad cholesterol in our body and maintain it at the right level.

Another factor that causes high cholesterol levels is triglyceride, which is a form of fat. It comes from food and is also made in your body. People with high triglycerides will often have a high total cholesterol level too.

The Importance of Understanding Your Cholesterol Level
It is extremely important to know your cholesterol levels. This is because having untreated high cholesterol can make you very prone to heart attacks and strokes. Although obesity is one of the most obvious causes of high cholesterol, just because you have an ideal weight does not mean that you have the right cholesterol level.

Basically your level of cholesterol can be categorized in one of three categories of cholesterol levels, which are: desirable, borderline risk, or high risk. You are considered as being in the desirable category if your total cholesterol is less than 200mg/dL, and the risk of getting a heart attack is relatively low, unless if you have other risk factors for the condition.

If your cholesterol is between 200 and 239mg/dL, you are considered in the borderline risk category. About a third of all people are in this category. If you are in the borderline category, you should check your cholesterol level at least once a year, especially if your HDL is less than 40mg/dL and/or you don’t have other risk factors for heart disease.

Lastly, if your cholesterol level is at 240mg/dL or more, you are in the high risk category. This means your risk of heart attack and stroke is very high. You will also have twice the risk of other coronary problems. If you are in this category, you must be more careful and start taking steps to improve your condition.

The most important to remember is lower LDL cholesterol, means lower total cholesterol level. Take all of the possible measures to keep your LDL cholesterol as low as possible. If you still are not able to lower your cholesterol, you can ask your doctor to prescribe medications to assist you in this process.

My Health Advisor, an online tool from the American Diabetes Association, can help you understand your risk. All you have to do to is enter some basic health information, such as:

• Family history
• Height and weight
• Blood glucose level
• Cholesterol level
• Smoking history
• Age, race, gender

My Health Advisor takes your information and creates a personalized online health profile, and will let you know if you are at risk. Your results are compared to results of dozens of clinical trials to make sure it is accurate.

My Health Advisor will also create a personalized plan that will help you lower your risk of diabetes and heart disease. Tips may include eating healthier foods or smaller portions, and increasing your level of physical activity. But the real benefit is that you can see instantly how these small changes to your day-to-day routine can lower your risk.

With each small change, you will be on your way to a longer, healthier life. You can stop type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Visit www.CheckUpAmerica.org/MA today for your personalized risk profile.

To learn more about type 2 diabetes and heart disease, call the American Diabetes Association at (800) DIABETES (800 342-2383), e-mail AskADA@diabetes.org or visit www.CheckUpAmerica.org.

Courtesy of ARAcontent

Fat finds itself in and out of fashion more frequently than flares and leggings. One minute we are being urged to avoid it and told that very low-fat diets are the way to go; the next we are encouraged to gorge on it, Atkins-style. Throughout fat’s fluctuating popularity, there has been one constant: that saturated animal fats are bad, bad, bad for the heart and we consume too much of them at our peril. But is even this accepted wisdom a big fat lie? That is the case argued in a controversial new book by a leading Canadian chef and food expert. She suggests that saturated fat’s killer reputation is wholly undeserved.

In Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes, Jennifer McLagan not only questions the scientific basis for a low-fat diet, but argues that many of our health woes have arisen from our attempts in recent years to cut down on butter, lard, suet and other saturated animal fats. She argues we should be eating more, not less, of them. “You can’t live without fat,” she says. “It gives us energy and boosts the immune system. Some fats have antimicrobial properties, others lower bad cholesterol. Your brain is made of fat and cholesterol, as are the membranes of your cells.”

McLagan claims that much of the bad rap surrounding saturated fat stems from flawed studies that were carried out between the 1950s and 1970s, mostly by the American physiologist Ancel Keys. It was Keys who first came up with what is known as the diet-heart hypothesis, after some of his research showed that a high intake of animal fat not only raised cholesterol levels but was strongly linked to heart attacks. His findings prompted medical experts around the world to change dietary recommendations to those that are still heavily promoted today: in short, cut down on animal fats for the sake of your heart.

Certainly, it is almost impossible to find nutrition health campaigns that advocate eating more animal fat. Even those behind the Atkins diet, who once encouraged followers to eat fatty foods, are now promoting a toned-down plan, with more lean meat and fish than sausages, cheese and bacon. Recent research into what has been dubbed the “eco-Atkins” approach at the University of Toronto showed that a low-carbohydrate diet in which animal protein was replaced by vegetable sources, such as soy, wheat (gluten) and nuts, not only reduced weight but lowered blood pressure and cholesterol more effectively than other diets. “We took out the saturated fat and cholesterol and put in vegetarian protein sources,” says Dr David Jenkins, a professor of nutritional sciences, who led the research. “We know that nuts lower cholesterol and prevent heart disease, and soy is eaten in the Far East, where they don’t get much heart disease. So these foods can be put together as protein and fat sources.”

However, there are many who remain sceptical about fat’s role in heart disease, claiming that gaping holes existed in the research that led to saturated fats being branded a killer. In one of his landmark studies, for instance, Keys looked at animal-fat consumption in seven countries. Although he found a high intake was a strongly linked to heart disease, the data wasn’t rock solid, and in three of the countries studied there was no clear link. Other researchers have failed to show animal fat is as harmful as we are led to believe. In one of the largest government-funded research programmes in America, the Women’s Health Initiative study, carried out at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle in 2006, a diet low in total fat and saturated fat was shown to have no impact in reducing heart disease among nearly 49,000 women who took part.

Glenys Jones, a nutritionist at the Medical Research Council’s human nutrition research department in Cambridge, says that saturated fat does have an undeservedly poor reputation. “There are different forms of saturated fat, and the fat in red meat, for example, is a form called stearic acid, which isn’t linked to heart disease,” she says. “Other forms, such as the fat in butter, have a much stronger association, and, of course, too much of any fat will result in obesity, which is itself a risk factor for heart disease.” Such confusion, McLagan says, means that “nobody has ever been able to prove the supposed link between a diet high in animal fat and cardiovascular disease, and that’s why we have people such as the Inuit, who eat a lot of animal fat and who do not have high rates of heart disease”.

Myth Busted: Eating Eggs Has Virtually No Effect on Cholesterol Levels

Sunday, April 05, 2009 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer

Eating eggs does not significantly raise the body’s cholesterol levels, according to a new study conducted by researchers from the University of Surrey and published in the Nutrition Bulletin of the British Heart Foundation.

The researchers reviewed the results of several different studies on eggs and nutrition, concluding that eggs did not contribute significantly to the body’s cholesterol levels. Although eggs are in fact a high-cholesterol food, the researchers note that only one-third of the body’s cholesterol comes from dietary sources; the rest is produced by the body from saturated fats. As a consequence, saturated fat intake plays a far more significant role.

“The ingrained misconception linking egg consumption to high blood cholesterol and heart disease must be corrected,” researcher Bruce Griffin said. “The amount of saturated fat in our diet exerts an effect on blood cholesterol that is several times greater than the relatively small amounts of dietary cholesterol.”

The researchers note that other factors, such as obesity, a sedentary lifestyle or smoking also have greater effects on cholesterol levels or the risk of cardiovascular disease than egg consumption does.

“The UK public does not need to be limiting the number of eggs they eat,” Griffin said. “Indeed, they can be encouraged to include them in a healthy diet, as they are one of nature’s most nutritionally dense foods.”

Up until 2007, the British Heart Foundation (BHF) recommended that people limit their intake of eggs to three per week, as a way of reducing the risk of heart disease. That advice is now considered outdated, however.

“We recommend that eggs can be eaten as part of a balanced diet,” said Victoria Taylor of the BHF. “There is cholesterol present in eggs, but this does not usually make a great contribution to your level of blood cholesterol. If you need to reduce your cholesterol level, it is more important that you cut down on the amount of saturated fat in your diet from foods like fatty meat, full fat dairy products, and cakes, biscuits and pastries.”

Changing your diet to lose weight is not the same as changing your diet to control your cholesterol level. While losing weight will certainly improve your health, you also need to monitor your diet to exclude foods that are causing your high cholesterol levels.

Monitoring your diet does not mean giving up all the foods you love. Many foods are healthy and good for you. For instance, a good variety of fruits and vegetables (with five or more servings per day), grain products like bread, cereal, rice, and pasta (choose six or more servings per day).

Changing your diet to lose weight is not the same as changing your diet to control your cholesterol levelIn addition, lean meats and poultry ( without skin and up to 6 ounces per day), fat-free and low fat milk , beans and peas , nuts and seeds in limited amounts, and fatty fish ( which can be baked or broiled , but limited to 2-3 servings per week ). You should use vegetable oils like olive oil or corn oil when preparing your foods. There is also a large assortment of spices to give your food that extra pizzazz.

There are a number of foods you should omit from your diet if you want to lower your cholesterol. Whole milk and ice cream should be avoided. Additionally, butter, egg yolks, and cheese and foods that include them should be removed from your diet. Finally, organ meats like liver, high-fat processed meats (like sausage and hot dogs), and limit your intake of fried foods.

Eating healthier involves knowing how to prepare your foods and changing your diet. If you are not able to lower your cholesterol by diet and exercise alone, your doctor may have to prescribe medication.

Dieting and eating healthier to lower your cholesterol will improve your quality of life and significantly reduce your risk of other health problems. High cholesterol is a serious health problem, and you can take action to avoid further health complications.