Healthier Lifestyle With Foods Low In Cholesterol
Cholesterol is a vital part to many bodily functions, including the metabolism of important vitamins and minerals and the maintenance of cell membranes. Without cholesterol, your body would not function nearly as effectively, and your cells would be much weaker. However, too much cholesterol is just as bad as too little, and there are only a few ways to lower your cholesterol levels.
Some people prefer to take medications which lower cholesterol, but many people agree that they take too many medications already. Besides costing a lot of money, medications often have many unseen side effects that only become apparent after years of use. The more natural and cost effective way to lower cholesterol is to eat foods low in cholesterol.
Stay Away From Those Fats
One of the easiest ways to start lowering cholesterol is to stop eating fatty foods, especially saturated and transitive fats. Because this is such an important issue, many restaurants have banned transitive fats and replaced them with alternatives which are much less harmful. Fatty foods aren't low in cholesterol because they provide many of the materials needed for your body to synthesize cholesterol. So what foods are low in cholesterol?
Oatmeal and other oat products are already popular breakfast foods, low in cholesterol and generally healthy all around. Did you know that having a bowl of oatmeal each morning can reduce your overall cholesterol levels by five percent? If you're looking to reduce your cholesterol levels, a breakfast diet of oatmeal probably isn't going to cut it. However, by drinking two eight ounce servings of orange juice a day, you can further reduce your cholesterol by another ten percent! So, just by eating oatmeal and drinking orange juice, you can reduce your cholesterol by a total of fifteen percent.
If that's not enough, there are even more foods low in cholesterol. Try some walnuts and almonds, generally recommended up to twenty percent of your daily calorie intake, to reduce your blood cholesterol levels. Various plant oils, such as soybean oil, are thought to have cholesterol lowering properties, and a very popular choice is now fish, which can drastically reduce your cholesterol.
While most people don't fancy eating fish four or five times a week, once or twice can help reduce your cholesterol substantially. Of course, this is just a general outline of some food groups that you should look to put in your diet if you want to lower your cholesterol. With a diet centered around foods low in cholesterol, you will probably never need to take cholesterol medicine.
