High cholesterol can increase your risk of heart disease and stroke. Lowering it without medication can be difficult, depending on your age and other health problems. For people with high cholesterol due to genetics, it can be nearly impossible without taking a statin, a prescription cholesterol-lowering drug.
But for many of us, lifestyle changes are enough to lower cholesterol. Doctors almost always recommend exercise and not smoking, along with eating less saturated fat and trans fat. And losing weight, just five to ten pounds, can have a big impact on cholesterol.
But there’s another measure that may surprise you and that’s easy to make: Eat less sugar.
Sugar has a complicated relationship with cholesterol. But simply put, if you eat more calories than your body needs to fuel your daily activities, the excess calories are stored as triglycerides, a type of fat or lipid that circulates in your blood and makes up your total blood cholesterol, along with HDL and LDL. This is especially true of nutrient-poor foods that are high in sugar and white flour, such as cupcakes, cookies, and candy bars.
You’re in trouble if you regularly eat sweets and don’t burn off the excess calories. Not only will you gain weight, but your triglycerides are likely to increase, increasing your total cholesterol and your risk of heart disease, heart attack, and stroke.
Some steps you can take to lower your cholesterol:
- Weight loss: Losing just 5 to 10 pounds can lower your triglycerides.
- Don’t smoke: Improve your HDL cholesterol.
- Reduce kilojoules: Excess calories that aren’t burned off through physical activity are converted to triglycerides and stored as fat.
- Limit sugary, refined foods: Eating a lot of foods made with sugar and white flour can increase triglycerides. Limit these added sweets to 25 grams per day for women, 36 grams per day for men. One teaspoon of regular sugar or honey is 4 grams.
- Limit fruit juice: Even 100% natural fruit juice is high in sugar. It’s like drinking liquid sugar and is one of the first things to go when trying to lower triglycerides. Eating whole fruit is much better.
- Choose healthy fats: Including olive oil, canola oil, peanut oil, sunflower oil, and corn oil. Avoid trans fats or partially hydrogenated oils found in packaged cookies, crackers, and snack foods. Avoid solid fats.
- Limit alcohol: Drinking too much alcohol can increase triglycerides and raise blood pressure. A glass of wine a day has been linked to higher HDL levels. But if you don’t drink, don’t start. Avoid sugary drinks.
- Exercise: Get at least 30 minutes of physical activity every day to lower triglycerides and increase HDL, or good cholesterol.
- Fish oil: Eat seafood rich in omega-3 fatty acids regularly. Talk to your doctor about whether you need to take fish oil supplements to lower triglycerides.
- Add these foods to your diet: Avocados, almonds, walnuts, flaxseeds, whole grains, plant sterols and stanols found in fortified products, including margarine, milk, yogurt, some cooking oils, and salad dressings.
- Increase soluble fiber: Eat more oats and oat bran, fruits, beans, and lentils to lower LDL cholesterol.
