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How to lower your cholesterol absolutely free
Recent cholesterol guidelines are recommending that most people aim
for an LDL cholesterol level of 70 or lower. That's down from the previous
suggestion of 100. And of course, the number one recommended way to lower
your cholesterol, according to the popular press and pharmaceutical companies,
is to take statin drugs. The more you take the better, they seem to be
saying, and if your cholesterol isn't low enough yet, it simply means
you need to take more statin drugs. And by the way, you're supposed to
be taking these statin drugs for the rest of your life, as many physicians
have now ridiculously sworn to do.
But let's get back to reality for a second here -- high cholesterol
is not caused by a lack of statin drugs. High cholesterol is caused by
lifestyle choices, such as consuming certain foods and avoiding physical
exercise, and the only natural way to lower cholesterol also happens
to be a completely cost-free way to do so: by changing the foods you
purchase and consume and by engaging in regular physical exercise. Doing
so will cause your cholesterol levels to plummet on their own, without
needing dangerous prescription drugs.
The information I'll share with you here is exactly what I followed
to achieve an LDL cholesterol of 67 and HDL cholesterol of 62. Of course,
I wouldn't touch prescription drugs. These results were achieved through
nothing but nutrition, superfoods and physical exercise.
There is little doubt that the recent guidelines about lowering cholesterol
were timed to coincide with the recent marketing push for highly-profitable
statin drugs; in fact, six of the nine board members who issued the cholesterol-lowering
guidelines have financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture
these drugs, and yet they failed to disclose these financial ties in
their report, violating ethical practices in medicine.
Good doctors will tell people with high cholesterol to alter their lifestyle
first. They will ask them about what they're eating and how much exercise
they're getting, and recommend that they change foods to consume fewer
cholesterol-raising foods and greater quantities of cholesterol-lowering
foods. They will also recommend that their patients engage in frequent
cardiovascular exercise, which of course has a positive impact on cholesterol.
Statin drugs should be the last resort, or a temporary treatment if
used at all. They can help give the patient temporary assistance while
they make lifestyle changes that will bring cholesterol back into balance
on their own. But a lifetime on statin drugs is not a healthy strategy.
Clearly the human body was not designed to survive on a daily intake
of prescription drugs. So how do you actually lower your cholesterol
for free? What's the nitty-gritty of the advice here? Let's get down
to it.
First thing to do is remove foods from your diet that are causing high
cholesterol in the first place. There are two ingredients to watch out
for here. Number one is hydrogenated oils, also known as partially hydrogenated
oils. These oils are found in most margarine products and virtually all
baked goods such as cookies, crackers, pastries, and so on. They're even
found in many salad dressings and soups, believe it or not. You actually
have to read the ingredients labels and make sure you aren't ingesting
hydrogenated oils.
It is the hydrogenation of these oils that makes them toxic to the human
body. They belong to a class of ingredients known as metabolic disruptors.
This is a class of ingredients that interferes with normal human metabolism
and includes ingredients like sodium nitrite, MSG, aspartame, and white
flour.
The second ingredient to avoid if you want to keep your cholesterol
down is saturated animal fat -- the animal fat found in beef and other
red meats. Certainly you don't want to be eating lard or anything cooked
with lard, and you want to consider limiting or completely avoid consuming
red meat.
Other foods that will raise your bad cholesterol level include foods
made with unhealthy or cheap oils such as soybean oil. There's nothing
really wrong with soybean oil, it's just that it's not especially healthy,
and it's one of the cheapest oils out there, so most people get far too
much of it and not enough of the healthy oils. But we'll talk about the
good fats in a minute.
Finally, avoid processed foods. That includes any food that is manufactured
and comes in a pretty package. Virtually all processed foods are unhealthy
foods, and the more a food has been processed and perverted from its
original, natural form, the less healthy it's going to be, and the more
likely it will raise your LDL cholesterol.
Now let's talk about foods you can eat that will lower your LDL cholesterol
and raise your HDL cholesterol. These include the healthy oils, sometimes
called the "good fats" -- items such as omega-3 oils, found
in flaxseeds. You can also get healthy oils by consuming extra-virgin
olive oil, extra-virgin coconut oil, or by eating nuts like macadamias,
pecans, cashews, and peanuts. Even peanut oil is quite healthy for you,
as long as you're not buying peanut butter made with hydrogenated oils,
as most peanut butter products are. Look for the Adams brand peanut butter.
It's the one where the oil has separated from the rest of the peanut
butter, and that's how you know it has no hydrogenated oils.
Beyond the healthy fats, there are also a variety of groceries that
can help you lower your cholesterol levels, such as garlic, ginger, onions,
and basically any fruits and vegetables that are not processed or overcooked.
Whole grains, such as kamut, pearled barley, whole grain oats, or wheat
berries can also help reduce cholesterol by giving you extra fiber that
interferes with the absorption of cholesterol-promoting fats.
Moving on to the supplementation side, there are a great number of nutritional
supplements that can help you lower cholesterol naturally without using
drugs. One such nutritional supplement is red yeast rice, an item that
has been oppressed by the FDA. In fact, the FDA has attempted to outlaw
and regulate this substance, claiming it is a drug because it lowers
cholesterol so effectively. In fact, red yeast rice was found to be more
effective than statin drugs in lowering cholesterol, and of course the
FDA can't stand for anything in the natural market to work so well, so
they have to do their best to wipe it out, or at least make it illegal
to sell to consumers. Garlic is another popular supplement with well-documented
cholesterol-lowering effects. In addition to eating garlic as part of
your diet, you can take garlic supplements that will further accelerate
your cholesterol decline.
Superfoods are also extremely helpful for lowering high cholesterol
and enhancing your overall body health. I talk quite a bit about superfoods.
These are items that I personally consume on a daily basis and that I
strongly recommend to others. Of course, my own LDL cholesterol is considered
extraordinarily low (67), so I do know what I'm talking about here. My
favorite superfoods include chlorella, spirulina, sea vegetables, soy
products such as soy milk, soy cheese, or tofu, any sprouts, such as
wheat grass, broccoli sprouts, barley grass or clover sprouts, and also
the supergrains such as quinoa, millet, and kamut. In addition, I recommend
organic, whole-food vitamin supplements -- supplements that are made
exclusively from whole-food sources and not from isolated chemical vitamins,
as well as coral calcium, which is an outstanding source of not only
calcium, but also magnesium, zinc, and trace minerals from the ocean.
Just in case this hasn't been enough advice yet, let's bring in physical
exercise, because regular exercise is a crucial point when considering
cardiovascular health and cholesterol levels. By engaging in regular
physical exercise -- that is, at least 5 hours a week -- you can dramatically
reduce your bad cholesterol levels and lose weight at the same time.
Of course, this probably isn't new information to you, since we all know
that exercise is good for us, but few people tend to consider exercise
as a cholesterol-lowering strategy. In reality, it's far more powerful
than any prescription drug in existence!
If you put all of this together, you have an unbeatable strategy that
actually costs you nothing. In fact, the foods mentioned here will save
you so much money over the brand-name foods you might have normally been
purchasing that you'll have plenty of money left over to purchase superfood
supplements. For example, a pound of quinoa can be purchased for as little
as three or four dollars, and yet can provide a healthy whole grain for
several weeks of cooking. Fresh fruits and vegetables are extremely inexpensive
compared to the high markups on manufactured foods like breakfast cereals,
dinner mixes, frozen foods, and microwavable meals.
Your money will go much further when you're choosing healthy foods to
begin with. And of course the exercise part of this is free of charge,
or if you decide to join a gym, the monthly fees are inconsequential
compared to the cost of a lifetime of addiction to prescription drugs
and visits to your physician.
Now, with all that said, let me repeat that a good doctor -- that is,
a doctor that is genuinely concerned with your health and who is well-informed
about the relationships between nutrition and disease -- would be telling
you all of this in the first place. A bad doctor, -- a doctor steeped
in Western medicine and brainwashed by the pharmaceutical industry into
ignoring nutrition and focusing on drugs -- would recommend little more
than taking statin drugs, and would be happy to write you a couple of
prescriptions and get you out of his way so he can see the next patient.
It's easy to tell if you have a good doctor or a bad doctor by simply
visiting him or her and asking what you should do about your high cholesterol.
Their answer reveals their level of health wisdom.
In addition to good doctors and bad doctors, however, there are also
good patients and bad patients. What I mean by this is demonstrated in
the following example. Many people ask me how they can lower their cholesterol
naturally, and when they do, I typically tell them the same thing that
I've related here in this commentary. I tell them if you do all of these
things, if you avoid these foods, if you take these supplements, if you
eat these other foods, and if you engage in regular physical exercise,
your LDL cholesterol will drop naturally and will maintain a level well
below 70. They usually interrupt me at some point in this conversation
and say something similar to the following: "No, what I meant was,
how can I lower my cholesterol without actually doing anything?"
For those people, statin drugs are the perfect answer. You don't have
to do anything but take statin drugs every day, pay the bill, and of
course, run the risk of damaging other organs in your body from a lifetime
of exposure to toxic prescription drugs such as statins. (These drugs
are now being shown to cause birth defects, by the way...) Your sex hormone
production will be disrupted, your liver function will be impaired, and
your body's ability to manufacture the natural levels of cholesterol
it needs to function properly will also be dramatically lowered. But
if you don't want to do anything, and still desire a lower level of cholesterol,
and don't care about abusing your body, then statin drugs are certainly
one way to accomplish that.
The bottom line to all of this is that a good patient doesn't even need
to visit a doctor to lower their own cholesterol. All they need to do
is take responsibility for their health, start pursuing a lifestyle with
healthy foods, outstanding nutrition, and frequent physical exercise,
and then, if they were to ever visit a doctor, that doctor would simply
say, "Hey, your cholesterol is perfectly normal. Good job." |
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