Low Cholesterol Diet
Low cholesterol diet plan ideas
While fat is a necessary and beneficial source of dietary energy, consuming too much of it increases your risk of developing any number of nasty health problems, including high cholesterol. High cholesterol levels greatly increase your chances of suffering a heart attack or stroke, but the good news is that you can significantly lower your cholesterol levels in a relatively short period of time by following a low cholesterol diet.
Creating a Low Cholesterol Diet Plan
Because both saturated and unsaturated fats raise cholesterol levels in your bloodstream, a low fat, low cholesterol diet is favored by an overwhelming majority of nutritionists and doctors. This type of diet, as the name implies, limits your intake of cholesterol-rich fatty foods as well as compounds such as sodium, which cause your body to retain existing cholesterol even if you’ve already decreased your fat intake.
Low cholesterol diet menus have five specific goals:
- Limit overall fat intake, especially intake of saturated fats.
- Decrease the intake of specific cholesterol-rich foods.
- Limit the intake of sodium.
- Add more fiber and complex carbohydrates.
- Decrease or limit caloric intake so the dieter can lose weight or maintain a healthy body weight.
One specific variant to consider is the low cholesterol, low triglyceride diet. Triglycerides are a form of fat that remains in the bloodstream, and healthy levels should not exceed 200 mg per deciliter of blood. Patients with heart disease are often instructed to specifically monitor and limit their triglyceride intake to achieve and maintain triglyceride levels in the acceptable range. If you need to take this approach for better health, you will want to be more careful with grains and complex carbohydrates than other dieters, since triglycerides primarily come from the metabolization of sugars and starches.
Low Cholesterol Diet Foods to Add to Your Shopping Cart
While your physician can help you devise a low cholesterol diet plan that’s suited to your individual needs, there are some simple steps you can take right away to start eating better. Essentially, you’ll want to eat less fat-rich red meat and consume more lean white meat while adding fiber-rich fresh fruits and vegetables. Oats are also an excellent source of soluble fiber, which is vital to any dieter seeking to lower cholesterol levels, and you’ll want to be careful with eggs and dairy products.
If you combine a low cholesterol dieting strategy with regular exercise, you’ll see results in a matter of weeks. Implementing changes to your habits over time works best if you’ve been stuck in a high-fat, low-exercise quagmire for an extended period of time.
