Cholesterol gets so much bad press that it’s hard to believe that your body actually needs it. There are two kinds of cholesterol in your body, good cholesterol also known as HDL cholesterol, and bad cholesterol or LDL cholesterol. Cholesterol in your body is necessary to make hormones, vitamin D and bile salts.
The bad cholesterol on the other hand can cause you lots of problems. The main worry with LDL cholesterol is that it will dump cholesterol onto artery walls that will create plaque. The plague in turn will narrow and block the arteries. This may cause blood flow to be blocked, which is bad news for your heart.
Increase in Cholesterol levels – Reasons
There are a lot of confusing terms being thrown around when it comes to cholesterol. Dietary cholesterol is one of those terms. You might think that all dietary cholesterol is bad, but in fact dietary cholesterol does not raise blood cholesterol as much as you might think. The two bad guys here are trans fatty acids and saturated fats.
So when you think about cholesterol problems what you want to do is reduce your levels of bad cholesterol. The best way to do this is through dietary changes. Besides cutting down on foods with bad cholesterol such as meat, dairy, eggs and seafood, you can also eat other foods that will reduce LDL levels.
Packaged food contains a lot of trans fatty acids such as Microwave popcorn, hard stick margarine french fries which are normally served in the fast food outlets. By eliminating these foods you can cut down your consumption of trans fatty acids which contribute to bad cholesterol in your system.
Upping Good Fats
Consuming a good deal of packaged food and margarine or micro wave popcorn and also French fries are responsible for the increasing of the trans fatty acid. Stay away from fast food as this too leaves your cholesterol in a bad condition. Good cholesterol does all the cleaning up for you, like throwing out the excess cholesterol through the liver out of the body. That is why you need a good amount of good cholesterol which in turn cuts down the threat to your heart.
One more way of reducing bad cholesterol is to consume food which have abundant source of soluble fiber and polyunsaturated fats as well as monounsaturated fats. The good cholesterol will definitely increase with this change in eating habits.
You can also increase the amount of physical activity in your daily life to decrease cholesterol levels. Limiting alcohol intake to one glass a day for women and two a day for men is also a good idea.
Cholesterol info and resources. Get the learn about the healthy cholesterol levels for better living.
PXP - Polysaccharide X Peptides.