Selfsufficientish.com

My wife was told by her docter that she should take care of her elevated cholesterol level.
Is there an alternative to those so-called healthy margerines,like a herb tea or other food supplement?
Or perhaps a specific diet?

Hello, sorry to hear of your wifes recent diagnosis, however, I shouldn't worry too much as raised cholesterol is common in most people over about 30!

Please ignore all the expensive foods/margarines etc. Though they do go some way towards lowering cholesterol, a simple understanding of what you are trying to achieve will enable your wife (and you) to lower your cholesterol levels without buying faddy chemically enhanced foods.

Cholesterol is, in basic terms fat that moves around your body. It is essential to the normal day to running of your body and without it we would be in a bad way! However, western diets and reduced activity causes too much cholesterol to be created by the body. Unable to be used by the body, this surplus lines the walls of arteries waiting to be used. Unfortunately this fatty lining has a tendency to harden over time (arteriosclerosis) and this can break causing the soft walled arteries to rupture. This creates clots (to stop the bleeding, which ultimately can move to the heart and restrict blood flow (heart attack) or the lungs (pulmonary thrombus) or the brain (stroke). This risk is further increase by the fatty build up narrowing the arteries, reducing the amount of space available for these clots which normally pass freely around the body to pass through.

So, how to prevent this? well, its simple for me to type, but harder to do in real life (like most things worth doing!)

Certain foods can help to reduce cholesterol, Garlic, soya, oats and corn can help. Also, avoiding fatty foods, specifically those that contain trans fats and saturated fats. Exercise and healthy eating will also help. As a side effect, regular aerobic exercse (the type that gets you out of breath and makes your heart beat faster!) will as well as improving general health improve your ability to survive if you do suffer a heart attack or stroke. That said, don't go crazy running sprints and pushing weights! Any gym (or perhaps your doctor) should be able to offer a sensible exercise plan and a dietician (or some common sense planning) will be able to create a diet plan that not only reduces your wife's cholesterol but also improves her health generally.

My normal diet advice to patients is "eat less do more" but since you are asking on this website, I'll assume you have at least sufficiancy ideals so I'd suggest do more in the garden and eat more thats grown in the garden!

All the best and I hope everything gets sorted out for you both!

jim

Thanks for your elaborate reply,much appreciated!
This gives us plenty to work with.
...and a good excuse to plant and eat more garlic.
Fortunately we both love it.

I agree with the above advice. Supplements aren't the way to go. A combination of sensible low-fat diet and exercise is. Eat lots of veggies, especially colourful veggies like carrots or broccoli. (and garlic! ) They have lots of vitamins and anti-oxidants.

scrap wrote:My wife was told by her docter that she should take care of her elevated cholesterol level.
Is there an alternative to those so-called healthy margerines,like a herb tea or other food supplement?
Or perhaps a specific diet?

yeah, just cut down on butter/margarine and other high fat foods.

AFAIK, no plant foods contain cholesterol, so a vegan diet combined with daily exercise would be ideal.

Meehaja ...

I think you deserve congratulations for one of the most sensible advice postings I've seen - anywhere, ever.



Mike

I also have high cholesterol, but now I’m more careful about what I eat, I cut back a lot on junk food/fast food, eat cholesterol lowering products and drinks such as peanuts, rice, avocado, olives, walnuts, aloe vera, dark chocolate, almonds, garlic, green tea etc, cut out wheat and stopped smoking (see the ways how to lower cholesterol naturally). Just recently I had cholesterol check and now its much lower than it was before.

Please don't eat margarine.

I don't worry about cholesterol at all. I buy 3 packets of butter each week (i put it on vegetables or use it to cook with), have 2 or 3 eggs almost every day for breakfast, I eat cream with my fruit if I want to. I eat cheese as a snack or with meals. I fry potatoes in beef dripping. I eat meat and would have lamb chops for breakfast if I could afford them. when I wasn't pregnant we'd regularly eat liver, eggs and spinach for breakfast or supper (but you aren't supposed to have liver when you're pregnant). I'm slender, fit and strong and so is the rest of my family.

I don't eat shop bought bread, cake, biscuits, spreads, dips or anything pre-made. I don't eat anything with cooked vegetable fat in apart from olive oil, which I prefer raw and uncooked but will also use for cooking from time to time. So that's no vegetable oil, rapeseed oil, margarine, sunflower oil etc. I also don't eat sweetners or anything with a name that my Granny's Granny wouldn't recognise.
That doesn't mean I don't eat cake! I eat lots of homemade cake made with butter, eggs, flour and raw cane sugar. I don't feel I suffer, or miss out in any way because of the things that I eat.

I've always eaten like this (along with everyone else in my family) 3 years ago due to a mix up at the doctor's surgery I was sent to see a cardiologist. I went along to see him and had all kind of tests done. He was totally baffled. He said I had the healthiest heart he'd ever seen, 'the heart of a child' is what he said. After waiting in reception for them to work out what was going on, someone in admin realised that they'd got my file mixed up with someone else with the same name and a very similar birthday.

I can't promise that it's my diet that I have to thank for my healthy heart, I haven't done any randomised controlled trials, it'd never stand up in a peer reviewed study but I know it to be good for me.

You know there has never been a study that proves saturated fat causes heart disease.

I'm with herbalholly, up your good fats and cut out the processed stuff. Take a few more walks.

chickenchargrill wrote:You know there has never been a study that proves saturated fat causes heart disease.

I'd heard this too, no actual proven causal link, though I understand that the link between elevated LDL cholesterol and heart disease is strong and I believe that there is some fairly suggestive evidence that palm oil in particular can push up cholesterol levels and that trans-fats can do the same. The latter, of course can be either mono or poly unsaturated, but not saturated fats.

Since most trans-fats occur as a result of processing (hydrogenation for margarine, for example) and palm oil is widely used as a cheap bulking agent, the advice to stick as far as possible to fats that haven't been messed around with seems to be sensible.

Ultimately, the strongest link to raised cholesterol levels and early death from heart disease is from being overweight. While in many cases the surfeit of calories might come from palm oil or sugar or high fructose corn syrup, it is the fact the they are in surplus that probably counts most.

There is a huge amount of disinformation about cholesterol, most of it promulgated by the medical industry.
Google "Cholesterol Myths", or "Uffe Ravnskov" to access real scientific knowledge on this subject.

http://www.webmd.com/vitamins-supplemen ... e=LECITHIN

Our local health food store sells lecithin granules which are pretty inexpensive. They can be sprinkled on cereals or added to salads or just eaten as a spoonful of them. Sometimes I'll put them in salad dressing.

Definitely agree with the cut out bad fats and do more exercise advice. I like Micheal Pollan's advice "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." By food he means real food not 'food substances' like 'cheese food slices' etc.
There have been a few studies done on oyster mushrooms and their effect on lowering chololesterol. I love oyster mushrooms so it isn't too much of a hardship for me to eat lots of them!