Reducing Cholesterol and Looking After Your Heart Naturally
Hello Everyone! I hope that you are well. For this post, I am addressing cholesterol, gut health, and how to lower your risk of cardiovascular disease.
If you have been told that you need to reduce your cholesterol and you need to reduce it for your cardiovascular health, this post is for you and your loved ones.
Of course, run it by your doctor. A combination of treatments can often be more potent if multiple factors are going on. We usually hear from members at Eat Burn Sleep that medical professionals want to know what lifestyle they are following because of their remission success.
What Is Cholesterol?
Why Is High Cholesterol Not Healthy?
What Are the Risk Factors for Cardiovascular Disease?
Lifestyle Intervention for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention
How Can You Lower Cholesterol?
What Is a Low-cholesterol Diet?
What Is Cholesterol?
We need cholesterol. It is a natural fatty substance we need to build cells, make hormones like steroids and vitamin D, and aid digestion with bile acid. Our livers produce all the cholesterol that we need, and it is found in some of the foods that we eat.
Why Is High Cholesterol Not Healthy?
Elevated cholesterol levels in the blood are linked to a greater risk of heart attacks, strokes, and cardiovascular disease.
High cholesterol usually starts early in life, depending on what you eat and how you live, and progresses before manifesting itself as a disease.
There are no symptoms of high cholesterol, so prevention is critical.
What Are the Risk Factors for Cardiovascular Disease?
While reducing cholesterol is a great way to reduce the risk, many factors need to be considered.
One of the most critical advances in the cardiovascular field is that they identified the risk factors for cardiovascular disease.
These are:
• Chronic inflammation (and all of the below are linked with/can cause chronic inflammation)
• Metabolic issues (obesity, insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, imbalance of lipids + triglycerides-high cholesterol, and high blood pressure)
• Cigarette smoking
• Physical inactivity
• Excessive eating of unhealthy foods
• Genetics
Advancing age is a risk for chronic inflammation, so making lifestyle changes as soon as you can, whatever age, will have long-term benefits for your body and mind.
Prevention is key!
Lifestyle Intervention for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention
Lifestyle intervention is often the first port of discussion with a clinician and a patient.
Medication isn’t always the only solution. It is also worth remembering that medication causes gut dysbiosis, which causes chronic inflammation and a dysregulated immune system. It can create more issues than you started with. As much as medication can save lives, it doesn’t treat the source and why you have high cholesterol in the first place.
Taking tablets while physically inactive and eating the wrong type of fats every day will not help.
Unfortunately, doctors cannot follow us around and advise us on what to eat and what not to do to improve gut health and reduce chronic inflammation.
How Can You Lower Cholesterol?
You can lower cholesterol by following this anti-inflammatory lifestyle.
How you live, what you eat, how you deal with stress, and your genetic factors greatly affect your cholesterol balance.
Remember that some cholesterol foods are essential for your nutrition and gut health. It’s all explained in the Lifestyle Guide and the Personalized Advice sections when you become a member.
Remember, it isn’t just cholesterol that you need to concentrate on to reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease (see the above list).
These are wonderful dishes for reducing cholesterol: Persian Eggplant Stew & Paleo Vanilla Sponge Cake.
What Is a Low-cholesterol Diet?
Following a low-cholesterol diet is good for reducing your cholesterol, but you could still eat foods that cause chronic inflammation. Foods with inflammatory properties are all around us! Also, as I mentioned above, you could be missing out on essential nutrition from some foods we need for optimal health.
Chronic inflammation in the body is the most significant risk. It is linked to cardiovascular disease and 78% of deaths worldwide, so concentrating on cholesterol only is not enough.
You can protect your body from many chronic diseases by following this anti-inflammatory diet and lifestyle. Have you read What Is The Best Diet For Everyone?
In this study: Inflammation, not Cholesterol, Is a Cause of Chronic Disease, by Tsoupras et al. (2018), they present all the relevant data that supports this. They note it is ‘inflammation induced by several factors, such as platelet-activating factor (PAF) with its related inflammatory pathways that leads to the onset of cardiovascular diseases rather than cholesterol.’
‘The key is to control the inflammatory activities of PAF and other inflammatory mediators via diet, exercise, and healthy lifestyle choices.’
‘The cause of chronic diseases is chronic and unresolved inflammation and its manifestations. Instead of cholesterol, targeting and treatment of inflammation will lower the side effects of chronic disorders. Overall outcomes and the extensive paradigms of the beneficial effects of an anti-inflammatory diet, without any reported side effects, have radically shifted attention away from the lipid-centric hypotheses and the trends for targeting cholesterol towards more effective approaches against inflammation, which are the causative factors of chronic diseases.’
This study ends with a beautiful quote from Hippocrates of Kos, the father of modern medicine (460-377): “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
I wish you a fantastic day!
