National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. Arch Intern Med. You can begin to reduce your “bad” LDL cholesterol naturally by making a few simple changes in your diet. Health Tools Feeling unwell? Is there a risk of rhabdomyolysis from statins? The UCLP recommends that once you’ve created your balanced base diet, you add foods from each of four key groups with additional cholesterol-lowering effects. Exercise and fitness in the prevention of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.
Drug therapy with statins and other agents can result in dramatic lipidlowering effects. Despite the wealth of data supporting the beneficial effects of pharmacologic therapy on cardiovascular risk, patients often express a desire to accomplish similar goals with diet alone. And, except for patients with extreme cholesterol elevations, consensus panels all promote dietary therapy as an initial step in the treatment of hyperlipidemia. This review examines a variety of dietary strategies designed to lower lipid levels, including the American Heart Association diet, the Ornish diet, the Mediterranean diet, exercise, phytosterols, fiber, soy products, and fish oil.
Lifestyle changes can help improve your cholesterol — and boost the cholesterol-lowering power of medications. High cholesterol increases your risk of heart disease and heart attacks. Medications can help improve your cholesterol. But if you’d rather first make lifestyle changes to improve your cholesterol, try these five healthy changes. Exercise can improve cholesterol.
If your cholesterol is creeping upward, your doctor has probably told you that diet and exercise—the traditional cornerstones of heart health—could help to bring it down. And if you’d prefer to make just one change at a time to lower your cholesterol naturally, you might want to begin with your diet. A major analysis of several controlled trials involving hundreds of men and women found that dietary changes reduced LDL and total cholesterol while exercise alone had no effect on either. However, adding aerobic exercise did enhance the lipid-lowering effects of a heart-healthy diet. The people in the studies followed a variety of diets, from Mediterranean to low-fat to low-calorie. However, the most effective diets substituted foods with the power to lower cholesterol for those that boost cholesterol. While you may have to say goodbye to a few snacks and fast foods, you can replace them with others that are equally satisfying.