Cholesterol is one of the most feared and misinterpreted aspects of health I can think of. Contrary to popular belief, cholesterol is actually very important to your health and your liver actually produces about 1000 mg of cholesterol every day. It’s needed to build cell walls, make vitamin D and assist with the digestion of fat. Yet everyone’s trying to lower their cholesterol.
A Few Things to Get Straight
First, total cholesterol means almost nothing (sorry Lipitor). It is sometimes (read: sometimes) associated with increased risk of heart disease and other issues, but high cholesterol doesn’t CAUSE any of that. Blaming total cholesterol for heart disease like blaming stab-wound deaths on the blood that comes out.
Second, dietary cholesterol has almost nothing to do with total cholesterol or health in general. Every time I see someone cutting out egg yolks I’m compelled to fling myself out a nearby window. That’s not to say some foods don’t raise your cholesterol, but it’s not because they have cholesterol in them.
HDL and LDL Cholesterol
Even breaking it down to Low Density Lipoproteins (LDL) as “bad cholesterol” and High Density Lipoprotiens (HDL) and “good cholesterol” is horribly inaccurate. If you didn’t have both of them you would die. However, the ratio of HDL to LDL (also accounting for triglycerides, VLDL, etc) is a much better marker of health than total cholesterol. Again, it’s not causal (meaning cholesterol ratio doesn’t cause heart disease, it’s just associated with it) but it gives us an idea nevertheless.
How to Lower LDL Naturally
I want to make it clear that lowering LDL cholesterol specifically isn’t the goal, it’s just a side effect that will happen when we improve our health with the Prasouda diet. Lowering cholesterol artificially (through drugs like Lipitor) is essentially useless. That being said, here are a few steps you can take to that will improve your cholesterol ratio as a result of improving your health:
- Use virgin olive oil instead of cheap vegetable oil substitutes such as canola oil, soybean oil, safflower oil and corn oil. I’ll get into the ways in which vegetable oils wreak havoc on your body in another post (olives are technically a fruit). When someone tells you that eating fast food will lead to a heart attack, this is why.
- Limit excess sugar intake. Sugar deserves it’s own post as well to get into the problems caused by excess consumption. For now, just note that on average Americans consume almost 200 POUNDS of sugar every year, which is significantly more than we evolved to process.
Work on those two steps and you’ll be well on your way to lower LDL cholesterol and much better overall healthy. Other than that, begin implementing the Prasouda diet and you’ll start to notice the benefits of one of the healthiest diets on earth.