Six Changes to Make in Your Diet to Control High Cholesterol
If you are looking for a diet that creates a lowering impact, you should try to identify the best one. When you choose a good one, you must follow it with great discipline and commitment to creating good habits. Earlier, people believed that lowering cholesterol was about cutting out foods that are high in dietary cholesterol such as shrimp and eggs. This concept has changed, and nowadays, a cholesterol-reducing diet looks completely different. Today, the most important aspect is to replace the amount of saturated fat with healthy choices. Revamping the eating habits is very vital, and diet plans high cholesterol need to be avoided.
- Add a lot of vegetables and fruits to your diet menu
One of the simplest things you can do is to add a lot of fruits and vegetables to your diet. Although this method does not actively lower cholesterol, they are beneficial to keep your health steady. When you make a diet plan for your high cholesterol, you must add vegetables as side dishes and they can be used as meat alternatives. It is a good idea to use them for bulking up one-pot dishes such as casseroles and curries. Fruits can be used for making healthy cereal toppings or desserts, and you can even use them to make a delicious smoothie for breakfast.
Saturated fats can easily make you fat. For example; if you consume fats available in foods like meat products, cheese, full-fat milk, butter and other types of processed foods, you are going to increase the bad cholesterol or LDL cholesterol. One must never underestimate the importance of this aspect. This awareness is very critical when you are planning a diet to reduce cholesterol. If you want to reduce bad cholesterol, you must replace saturated fats with unsaturated fats. When you develop a meal plan, you must include foods like oily fish, vegetable oils, avocados, seeds, and nuts. If you are making a hurried prepared food purchase decision, you have to check the saturated fat content by going through the nutrition labels.
You have to introduce healthy options like high fiber foods in your diet plan if you have high cholesterol. For increasing your fiber consumption, wholegrain and brown version of rice, pasta, and bread must be used instead of going after plain or white versions. Grains such as barley and oats are healthy choices and you can definitely add porridge with fresh fruit or oat cereal to your meal plan. Beta-glucan is a fiber available in oats, and 3-gram daily consumption of this fiber effectively reduce the bad cholesterol. Other sources of fiber are pulses such as peas, lentils, and beans.
You can purchase oily fish such as trout, salmon, sardines, mackerel and herring and, including them in your diet plan when you have high cholesterol is a good option. Oily fish offers great taste and they contain a lot of unsaturated fat as well. That is why you can see them in most of the healthy balanced diet plans.
If you consume 1.5 to 2.4 grams of plant sterols per day, your cholesterol levels are lowered by 7% to 10% in three weeks. When you combine them with fruits and vegetables, you can easily bring cholesterol levels to healthy levels. Other prominent sources of plant sterols include seeds, nuts, and vegetable oils and you can combine all these foods to increase your plant sterol consumption.
The saturated fats you consume daily must not provide more than 10% of your daily calorie intake. Added sugars must be below 10%, and the sodium intake needs to be confined to 2300 mg daily. As far as trans fats are concerned, they have to be kept as low as possible, and the alcohol consumption should also be reduced to minimal levels. Smoking should not find a place in your routine chart, and you must perform workouts at least 30 minutes daily.
When you follow a diet plan according to your high cholesterol, you must treat yourself. When you reward yourself for achieving each small goal, it motivates you to move forward. It must be done by enjoying healthy desserts and snacks now and then. When you do so, it is less likely to go after cakes or crisps that contain saturated fat. This approach makes your diet plan innovative and interesting as well. Diet plans high cholesterol are not going to help, and they will make you vulnerable to a lot of diseases as well, You must focus on vegetables, fruits, plant sterols, fiber-rich foods and oily fish to make your diet plan to avoid high cholesterol and also which is healthy, smart and interesting as well.
