How Certain Diets Lower Cholesterol Levels More Effectively

To avoid health problems like diabetes and heart diseases, you must take steps to maintain the cholesterol level in the body. There are many factors that are responsible for increasing the your cholesterol levels within the body.

An important factor that can increase these levels in the blood is the weight of the person. When you shed the excess fat from your body, you can lower the bad cholesterol level and increase the level of good cholesterol.

A few other factors that can increase the bad levels, also know as LDL or low-density lipoprotein, include age, gender and lack of physical exercise. Also, some people have high cholesterol levels in their blood because most of their family members also suffer from this problem. One of the best ways of dealing with this problem is making changes in your diet.

How Can Certain Diets Lower Cholesterol

Most health experts are of the view that low-cholesterol diet is the best way of lowering the cholesterol levels. Cutting down the intake of bad cholesterol by about 20 percent will help in lowering the cholesterol levels and minimizes the risk of heart diseases.

An ideal low-cholesterol diet will include fish and vegetable oils and will exclude foods that contain trans fat and saturated fat. One of the ways of switching from high-cholesterol diet to low-cholesterol diet is by replacing trans fat margarine, polyunsaturated oils and butter that you use with olive oil, plant sterol spreads and canola oil.

If you want to keep your pan moist when cooking, you can cook with white wine vinegar instead of butter. White wine vinegar helps in reducing the cholesterol levels without changing the taste of the food. You can also lower the cholesterol levels by replacing ordinary eggs with cholesterol free eggs.

The Right Way of Changing Your Diet

If you want your low-cholesterol diet plan to be effective, you must make the right changes in your diet plan. Some people are not able to get the desired results because they don't make the right changes in the food they eat.

People, who eat high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet, run the risk of increasing their cholesterol levels. Cholesterol is an important requirement of the human body and our body has a backup plan if we make sudden changes in our diet.

When you eat low-cholesterol food, your liver starts producing cholesterol to make sure the minimum requirements of the body are met. When you eat high-carbohydrate, low fat diet, the insulin level in the body increases which triggers the body to move the excess sugar into the liver to produce cholesterol. Therefore, it is important that you include foods that contain good cholesterol in your diet plan.

Since the liver makes only about 75% cholesterol required by the body, the remaining cholesterol comes from the food you eat. If you reduce your intake of cholesterol and eat high carb foods, your body reacts by overproducing cholesterol to make sure the cholesterol levels are maintained.

This overproduction of cholesterol will not stop until you start eating foods that contain cholesterol. Therefore, it is important that you include good cholesterol foods in your diet plan and avoid eating foods that have high carbohydrate content.

 By Micah Chan