If you have recently seen your doctor to get the results of your cholesterol blood test, then it’s probably because you have some valid concerns about your diet, the role cholesterol plays in your diet, and have more questions about which foods lower cholesterol and how you can change your cooking to a low cholesterol diet.

Now, eating a diet that is good for you can be very straight forward. First of all you should be eating a diet that contains lots of fresh fruits and vegetables (the healthy carbohydrates), as well as protein from legumes (dried beans, peas and lentils), and meats or dairy products.

But this is where it starts getting a little difficult. Animal products, and this includes butter, meat, poultry, eggs and cheese, everything that comes from an animal contain cholesterol, with red meats, egg yolks and butter having the highest cholesterol levels.

For your cooking and recipes, you should try to add as many low cholesterol foods as you can, while you also work on decreasing the volume of high cholesterol foods.

The result will be a decreasing of the risk that you have for heart attacks and strokes.

The protein that animal foods provide is very important for the health of your internal organs, and for building strong muscles and tendons, as well as maintaining bones, hair, blood and skin. So, by some means you still need to have this protein in your daily foods, but it shouldn’t be from high cholesterol foods available. Seafood can also supply your diet with protein, and fish is a good source too, especially herring, sardines, and salmon which contain the omega 3 fatty acids that your body also requires.

Milk too has protein, but since it is an animal product it too has fat so you should drink skim milk, or 1% milk instead of whole milk or 2%. If your relatives are used to drinking the milk with higher fat levels, you may get some complaints initially, but in time, if you continue with the healthier choices, they will probably come to adjust to it.

Instead of cooking with butter (animal product), try using olive oil (plant product) in its place, especially the virgin olive oil which is processed less than the light olive oils. In fact the light olive oil refers to the color, and not the number of calories it contains – very misleading when we are used to light meaning fewer calories.

One way of reducing fat in baking is to use mashed bananas, apple sauce or pureed prunes instead of the fat, and this also gives you more fruit in your diet too.

Nuts are good for you when you are concerned about lowering your cholesterol, but make sure you only eat a handful a day, or you will be devouring too many calories which is generally not a good idea.

When you are preparing hamburgers, you can throw in some oats, as this is a good food to help you lower your cholesterol. Legumes, or pulses as they are also known, or more commonly, dried beans, peas and lentils are also good cholesterol lowering foods and they contain soluble fibre, as do barley, apples and pears.

There are a lot more hints and tips about foods which have high and low cholesterol as well as low cholesterol recipes here .

Tagged with: • • •

Filed under: Health and Fitness: Heart Disease

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!