Preventing heart disease and stroke is one of the reasons it is important to watch your diet and in particular maintain healthy levels of cholesterol. Eating a well balanced, healthy diet is paramount to good health.

If you’ve been diagnosed with high LDL cholesterol or you’re just trying to make some heart healthy choices, there are several things you can do with your diet, in particular, lowering your dietary saturated fat. To do that you should try to aim for lower fat animal products. This will help lower your saturated fat. Choose extra lean ground beef, take off the skin from your chicken and choose meats that are less marbled.

You can also add more fish and nuts and seeds as well as choosing vegetarian meals such as beans, and lentils and chickpeas. And try to get rid of some of those high fat deli meats such as bacon, sausages and salami.  Seeing a local registered dietician can help with food choices in regards to heart conditions.

You can also reduce your choice of high fat creamy sauces and choose more tomato sauces instead. And finally, limit your egg yolks. If you can limit egg yolks to only two per week, you’ll lower your saturated fat intake and your cholesterol. LDL cholesterol. Heart Failure Now Patient Communication System

If you’d like more information on how you can lower your saturated fat intake, you can contact your local registered dietitian. 

Cholesterol is a very vital part of our biology. We need cholesterol for certain things. We need cholesterol to stabilize cell membranes, to synthesize certain hormones.There are good cholesterol and bad cholesterol levels, and we all know that bad cholesterol is bad because that’s the fundamental process that leads to heart disease.

While there are a number of risk factors for heart disease, we know that the most potent risk factor is in fact smoking. However, high cholesterol – because it’s so much more common in a population in general than smoking – is actually the most important risk factor for heart disease at a population level.

Now, that’s good and that’s bad. It’s bad because it’s so common, but it’s good because it is manageable; it is preventable. Through living a healthy lifestyle, eating a healthy diet, low-fat diet, avoiding smoking, exercising and avoiding obesity, we can keep our LDL cholesterol levels low right from childhood all the way into adulthood.

And genetic experiments that have looked at this have clearly supported the idea that if LDL cholesterol is kept low from childhood into adulthood, the risk of heart disease is dramatically reduced.

Sometimes healthy living alone is not enough to control LDL cholesterol, and we need to turn to drug therapy. The statin drugs are an absolute cornerstone in treating not only LDL cholesterol, but in reducing lifetime risk of heart attack, of stroke, and of death due to heart disease.

While statin drugs have been a boon in the fight against heart disease, there are some people who can’t tolerate them due to the side effects, and sometimes the statins just aren’t powerful enough to get the LDL cholesterol under control.

While we do have several other options, we are particularly excited about new drugs and development that we hope to have available to us within a short period of time that will likely further help us in this battle against heart disease.

If you are concerned about your cholesterol level or if you want to learn more, then you absolutely need to consult with your family physician who can assess not only your cholesterol levels, but your risk for developing heart disease and your need for any treatment. LDL cholesterol. Heart Failure Now Patient Communication System

  Often seeing a local family physician or a pharmacist in conjunction with a registered dietitian is a great option to take control of dehydration.   

Now Health Network Local Practitioners: Cardiologist