Today, the term ‘Cholesterol’ figures repeatedly in health discussions, health articles, and health forums. The reason for this is this is not hard to comprehend. Cholesterol is a major cause of myriad of health problems, such as obesity, heart-related diseases, and high blood pressure. But is all cholesterol in the body bad? Not really.
Cholesterol is of two types: good cholesterol (HDL) and bad cholesterol (LDL). Cholesterol is an essential component required by human body to function normally. While certain amount of cholesterol in our body is essential, it is the presence of excessive amount of bad cholesterol, or LDL in the body that is undesirable and cause of various health problems.
How excessive LDL affects blood flow
Cholesterol is a lipid substance. When the levels of LDL are more than normal, LDL builds up in the arterial walls. As a result of which our arteries become clogged and are not able to transfer blood smoothly.
Causes of High LDL levels
- The Gene Factor – Genes can be the cause of elevated LDL levels in the blood. Familial hypercholesterolemia is an inherited condition in which a person has higher than normal cholesterol levels.
- The Food Factor – High intake of ‘fatty foods’ put you at a greater risk of developing high cholesterol. Unhealthy diet means more cholesterol enters your body than the liver is able to break and flush out of the body.
- The Lifestyle Factor – People who live sedentary lifestyle are at an increased risk of developing high cholesterol levels than those who exercise regularly. When you exercise, the process of breaking LDL fastens, ensuring that levels of cholesterol in your blood remains normal.
In addition to the above three reasons, the natural growing process can also facilitate the accumulation of LDL in the body. This is particularly true for women. Before menopause, women’s natural hormone release HDL, or good cholesterol, which facilitates carrying of LDL to the liver, where it is broken down and flushed out of the body system. However, after menopause the production of these hormones stops, slowing down the LDL elimination process.
How to help control Cholesterol naturally
One cannot choose parents or do much about aging, but can certainly improve his/her lifestyle and eat healthy to ensure cholesterol is maintained at normal levels. In fact, whatever the cause of high blood cholesterol levels, the condition can be immensely improved by exercising regularly and eating healthy.
- Balanced diet – Stop the intake of saturated fats; instead, focus on foods that have high amount of starch and fiber, such as fruits and vegetables. Also, instead of taking 3 heavy meals a day, eat 5-6 small meals.
- Exercise regularly – Make exercise a part of your daily routine. Pick up an exercise regime that interests and suits you and do it daily for 30-40 minutes.
Regular exercise and balanced diet, not only lowers blood cholesterol levels, but also helps in weight-reduction.
Combination of healthy food and balanced diet goes a long way in controlling cholesterol levels. To learn more about on how to help control cholesterol naturally, check out our natural cholesterol guide.
And to learn how to lower high blood pressure naturally, click here….
Think those three ways of accumulating high cholesterol oversimplify things. Cholesterol is the main building block for every one of our cells and when a part of the body is damaged cholesterol is sent out to repair it. One of the main causes of damage is inflamation and one of th emain causes of that is excess sugars and grains in our diet. In the case of sugars it’s becoming quite clear that fructose and especially high fructose corn syrup, is a major perpetrator. If you don’t eliminate the sorce of inflamation then the body will continue to send cholesterol to those areas to repair them e.g. the veins and arteries and eventually clog them up. To stop a build up of cholesterol which will harden over time and cause circulatory problems, you shouldn’t be looking to reduce your cholesterol levels, you should be looking to eradicate the source of inflamation. /
Thank you for the bits of info. I have noticed some healthy little changes in my life style.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t think cholesterol is a ’cause’ for obesity as stated in the thir sentence of this article.
thanks for the info…downbelow is an article from a prominant heart surgeon admitting that all the above theories about cholesterol and diet that have been taught are WRONg…read it if it intersts you
Heart Surgeon Admits Huge Mistake!
By Dwight Lundell, MD
We physicians with all our training, knowledge and authority often acquire a rather large ego that tends to make it difficult to admit we are wrong. So, here it is. I freely admit to being wrong.. As a heart surgeon with 25 years experience, having performed over 5,000 open-heart surgeries,today is my day to right the wrong with medical and scientific fact.
I trained for many years with other prominent physicians labelled “opinion makers.” Bombarded with scientific literature, continually attending education seminars, we opinion makers insisted heart disease resulted from the simple fact of elevated blood cholesterol.
The only accepted therapy was prescribing medications to lower cholesterol and a diet that severely restricted fat intake. The latter of course we insisted would lower cholesterol and heart disease. Deviations from these Recommendations were considered heresy and could quite possibly result in malpractice.
It Is Not Working!
These recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally defensible. The discovery a few years ago that inflammation in the artery wall is the real cause of heart disease is slowly leading to a paradigm shift in how heart disease and other chronic ailments will be treated.
The long-established dietary recommendations have created epidemics of obesity and diabetes, the consequences of which dwarf any historical plague in terms of mortality, human suffering and dire economic consequences.
Despite the fact that 25% of the population takes expensive statin medications and despite the fact we have reduced the fat content of our diets, more Americans will die this year of heart disease than ever before.
Statistics from the American Heart Association show that 75 million Americans currently suffer from heart disease, 20 million have diabetes and 57 million have pre-diabetes. These disorders are affecting younger and younger people in greater numbers every year.
Simply stated, without inflammation being present in the body, there is no way that cholesterol would accumulate in the wall of the blood vessel and cause heart disease and strokes. Without inflammation, cholesterol would move freely throughout the body as nature intended. It is inflammation that causes cholesterol to become trapped.
Inflammation is not complicated — it is quite simply your body’s natural defence to a foreign invader such as a bacteria, toxin or virus. The cycle of inflammation is perfect in how it protects your body from these bacterial and viral invaders. However, if we chronically expose the body to injury by toxins or foods the human body was never designed to process,a condition occurs called chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is just as harmful as acute inflammation is beneficial.
What thoughtful person would willfully expose himself repeatedly to foods or other substances that are known to cause injury to the body? Well, smokers perhaps, but at least they made that choice willfully.
The rest of us have simply followed the recommended mainstream diet that is low in fat and high in polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates, not knowing we were causing repeated injury to our blood vessels. This repeated injury creates chronic inflammation leading to heart disease, Stroke, diabetes and obesity.
Let me repeat that. The injury and inflammation in our blood vessels is caused by the low fat diet recommended for years by mainstream medicine.
What are the biggest culprits of chronic inflammation? Quite simply, they are the
Overload of simple, highly processed carbohydrates (sugar, flour and all the products made from them) and the excess consumption of omega-6 vegetable oils like soybean, corn and sunflower that are found in many processed foods.
Take a moment to visualize rubbing a stiff brush repeatedly over soft skin until it becomes quite red and nearly bleeding. You kept this up
Several times a day, every day for five years. If you could tolerate this painful brushing, you would have a bleeding, swollen infected area that became worse with each repeated injury. This is a good way to visualize the inflammatory process that could be going on in your body right now.
Regardless of where the inflammatory process occurs, externally or internally, it is the same. I have peered inside thousands upon thousands of arteries. A diseased artery looks as if someone took a brush and scrubbed repeatedly against its wall. Several times a day, every day, the foods we eat create small injuries compounding into more injuries, causing the body to respond continuously and appropriately with inflammation.
While we savor the tantalizing taste of a sweet roll, our bodies respond alarmingly as if a foreign invader arrived declaring war. Foods loaded with sugars and simple carbohydrates, or processed with omega-6 oils for long shelf life have been the mainstay of the American diet for six decades. These foods have been
Slowly poisoning everyone.
How does eating a simple sweet roll create a cascade of inflammation to make you sick?
Imagine spilling syrup on your keyboard and you have a visual of what occurs inside the cell. When we consume simple carbohydrates such as sugar, blood sugar rises rapidly. In response, your pancreas secretes insulin whose primary purpose is to drive sugar into each cell where it is stored for energy. If the cell is full and does not need glucose, it is rejected to avoid extra sugar gumming up the works.
When your full cells reject the extra glucose, blood sugar rises producing more insulin and the glucose converts to stored fat.
What does all this have to do with inflammation? Blood sugar is controlled in a very narrow range. Extra sugar molecules attach to a variety of
proteins that in turn injure the blood vessel wall. This repeated injury to the blood vessel wall sets off inflammation. When you spike your blood
Sugar level several times a day, every day, it is exactly like taking Sandpaper to the inside of your delicate blood vessels.
While you may not be able to see it, rest assured it is there. I saw it in over 5,000 surgical patients spanning 25 years who all shared one common denominator — inflammation in their arteries.
Let’s get back to the sweet roll. That innocent looking goody not only contains sugars, it is baked in one of many omega-6 oils such as soybean. Chips and fries are soaked in soybean oil; processed foods are manufactured with omega-6 oils for longer shelf life. While omega-6’s are essential –they are part of every cell membrane controlling what goes in and out of the cell — they must be in the correct balance with omega-3’s.
If the balance shifts by consuming excessive omega-6, the cell membrane produces chemicals called cytokines that directly cause inflammation.
Today’s mainstream American diet has produced an extreme imbalance of these two fats. The ratio of imbalance ranges from 15:1 to as high as 30:1 in favor of omega-6. That’s a tremendous amount of cytokines causing inflammation. In today’s food environment, a 3:1 ratio would be optimal
and healthy.
To make matters worse, the excess weight you are carrying from eating these foods creates overloaded fat cells that pour out large quantities of pro-inflammatory chemicals that add to the injury caused by having high blood sugar. The process that began with a sweet roll turns into a vicious cycle over time that creates heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and finally, Alzheimer’s disease, as the inflammatory process continues unabated.
There is no escaping the fact that the more we consume prepared and processed foods, the more we trip the inflammation switch little by little each day. The human body cannot process, nor was it designed to consume, foods packed with sugars and soaked in omega-6 oils.
There is but one answer to quieting inflammation, and that is returning to foods closer to their natural state. To build muscle, eat more protein. Choose carbohydrates that are very complex such as colorful fruits and vegetables. Cut down on or eliminate inflammation- causing omega-6 fats like corn and soybean oil and the processed foods that are made from them.One tablespoon of corn oil contains 7,280 mg of omega-6; soybean contains 6,940 mg. Instead, use olive oil or butter from grass-fed beef.
Animal fats contain less than 20% omega-6 and are much less likely to cause inflammation than the supposedly healthy oils labelled
polyunsaturated. Forget the “science” that has been drummed into your head for decades. The science that saturated fat alone causes heart disease is non-existent. The science that saturated fat raises blood cholesterol is also very weak. Since we now know that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, the concern
about saturated fat is even more absurd today.
The cholesterol theory led to the no-fat, low-fat recommendations that in turn created the very foods now causing an epidemic of inflammation.
Mainstream medicine made a terrible mistake when it advised people to avoid saturated fat in favor of foods high in omega-6 fats. We now have an epidemic of arterial inflammation leading to heart disease and other silent killers.
What you can do is choose whole foods your grandmother served and not those your mom turned to as grocery store aisles filled with manufactured foods. By eliminating inflammatory foods and adding essential nutrients
from fresh unprocessed food, you will reverse years of damage in your arteries and throughout your body from consuming the typical American diet.
[Ed. Note: Dr. Dwight Lundell is the past Chief of Staff and Chief of Surgery at Banner Heart Hospital, Mesa, AZ. His private practice, Cardiac Care Center was in Mesa, AZ. Recently Dr. Lundell left surgery to focus on the nutritional treatment of heart disease. He is the founder of Healthy Humans Foundation that promotes human health with a focus on helping large corporations promote wellness. He is the author of “The Cure for Heart Disease and The Great Cholesterol Lie”] .
Very straight to the point. So basically, to be free of cancer, just eat healthy and exercise regularly 🙂