How to eat to lower cholesterol: the TRUTH
You want to know what to eat to lower cholesterol. The TV bombards you with the message: your cholesterol is too high. Cholesterol is linked to heart disease. You can just FEEL your veins hardening as you crunch down on your fried chicken and/or double bacon cheeseburger. It’s a heart-attack waiting to happen.
It’s also not true.
Isn’t that amazing? Hundreds of thousands of people are searching for the right foods to eat to lower cholesterol, and they shouldn’t be. We hear it over and over, but it’s just not true. The history behind WHY we think it’s true is a long and sordid one, and anyone who wants to know should go to their local library and check out “Good Calories, Bad Calories” by Gary Taubes. The first few chapters go into great detail about it, and the rest of the book is critically important to anyone who wants to survive to old age without heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, too.
The important part is the facts: cholesterol doesn’t cause heart disease. Cholesterol is your body’s way of defending itself from heart disease. Whenever your arteries get holes or rips in them, or they harden up and crack, cholesterol builds up over the injury to help it repair, exactly like a scab on your skin. Because cholesterol appears wherever there is an injury, scientists have noticed that there is a correlation between cholesterol and heart disease. That’s kind of like saying that if you have lots of blood on your floor, you are in danger of getting stabbed.
The fact is, high cholesterol means you already have issues in your arteries. The problem you are trying to address is not your high cholesterol count – it’s the unhealthiness of your arteries. The problem is that eating to lower cholesterol is not the same as eating to improve arterial health.
To improve arterial health, the important aspects of nutrition are simple:
- Eat a wide variety of vegetables and fruits
- Do not eat products made with processed flour or sugar (homemade or other).
- Get plenty of fatty animal meat.
- Do not eat homogenized milk.
The whys behind these rules are complex, but here’s the simplified version: veggies and fruits get your body running on good levels of vitamins and nutrients. Fatty animal meat provides essential fatty acids and essential amino acids which your body uses to repair injured tissue (like your arteries.) Homogenized milk actually has broken-down proteins which not only fail to provide nutrients to your body, but they catch in tiny, tiny flaws in your arterial wall, and cause larger rips and tears. Processed flour and sugars trigger hormonal responses in your body that disrupt your healing processes as well.
So, stop stressing over your cholesterol count! Start eating for your arterial health, and you’ll find that, while it might not happen as fast as your doctor would like, your arteries will become strong, at which point your cholesterol will naturally drop. As an added bonus, you will be significantly more likely to avoid heart disease than someone who takes the doctor’s cholesterol-specific dietary advice (which is, in the long run, more prone to cause heart disease than it is to cure it.) Trying to eat to lower cholesterol is a mistake – but eating to heal your arteries isn’t.
