I have heard people say that they want to lower their cholesterol levels in order to lose weight. The reason for decreasing your cholesterol levels is not because you want to lose weight. That is putting the cart before the horse. You almost certainly just have a couple of grammes of cholesterol in your body, so reducing that amount is not going to help you look any slimmer.
The reason for losing weight can include:
- wanting to lower your cholesterol levels;
- it can also include wanting to reduce your blood pressure;
- it can include wanting to take weight off your knees;
- it can include wanting to look healthier.
But there are a number of other reasons as well:
- losing weight will raise your general feeling of well-being,
- making you feel healthier and happier in general,
- reduce your likelihood of developing diabetes.
This piece is about cholesterol and how to lower the amount of cholesterol in your blood.
So, first of all, what is cholesterol?
The first thing to do is clear up the misapprehension that all cholesterol is bad. It is not.
There are two sorts of cholesterol:
– LDL cholesterol is not good for you for certain,
– HDL cholesterol is good for you because it helps mop up LDL.
In fact, not all LDL is bad either, your body requires some LDL to produce bile, vitamin D and maintain the correct balance of hormones, especially in women. So LDL gets a very bad press, but it is not a total villain. The problems begin if you have excess. It is like guests at a party, you have to have some, but too many and there are issues.
If you have excess LDL, it can clog your arteries, causing your heart to have to pump more, increasing blood pressure and consequently raising the danger of kidney failure, strokes and heart attacks.
How do you acquire too much LDL? Most LDL is taken into our bodies by eating saturated fats (animal fats) and hydrogenated or trans fats (usually discovered in junk food).
HDL picks up our surplus LDL and transports it back to the liver where it is dealt with. HDL is to be discovered in nuts, grains, pulses, fish oil and mono-unsaturated or poly-unsaturated fats. Therefore, the strategy in a nutshell is, if you are attempting to lower your LDL level through diet is to eat less animal fat as discovered in red meat and dairy products and eat more vegetarian food and fish. In particular, LDL is to be found in high quantities in beef, pork, milk, cheese, butter, cream, hamburgers, hot dogs, potato crisps, potato chips, et cetera and HDL is to be discovered in fresh fruit and vegetables, nuts, fish, whole grains, soya et cetera.
There are also a couple of myths. Some individuals say that eggs, liver and prawns are high in LDL, but the British Heart Foundation says that humans cannot access cholesterol from these foods, so they are safe to eat and others say that coconut is high in LDL too.
It is difficult to find concensus on coconut, but it appears that it raises LDL and HDL, but HDL by a little bit more than it raises LDL. So, not healthy for you if you have high cholesterol levels, but healthy if you have low levels.