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HowToPreventHeartDisease.com |
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Can You Manage Your Cholesterol Without Drug? Being a waxy substance found in the fats (lipids) in the blood, cholesterol is just one of the many substances created and used by human’s body to keep healthy. Liver and other cells produce most of the cholesterol (about 75 percent) while the remaining (about 25 percent) comes from the food consumed. Cholesterol can, however, be found only in animal products. Cholesterol can be classified as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Good cholesterol is also known as high-density lipoprotein (HDL) and the bad cholesterol is also called low-density lipoprotein (LDL). When there is too much LDL found in blood, the arteries could clog and the risk of getting heart disease and stroke will rise. HDL, on the other hand, helps keep the LDL from getting lodged into the artery walls. Maintaining a healthy (higher) level of HDL is essential because it would help protect against heart disease and stroke. A low level of HDL (less than 40 mg/dL for men and less than 50 mg/dL for women) has been found to increase heart disease risk. Consuming too much saturated fat, trans fats and dietary cholesterol could raise the levels of LDL. In the United States, around 25 percent of adults over the age of 45 are prescribed with statins, a cholesterol-lowering drug, to help them reduce levels of LDL. The drug, however, has side effects that might sap the energy and affect sex life.
There has been consensus that diet and lifestyle should be the primary means of lowering serum lipids and coronary heart disease (CHD) risk. But the ineffectiveness of dietary advice had been highlighted by the introduction of statins in the late 1980s. As such, health experts have seek ways to enhance the ability of conventional dietary therapy to reduce serum cholesterol through the inclusion of specific foods or food components with known cholesterol-lowering properties (dietary portfolio). In a study published in August 2011 in the ‘Journal of the American Medical Association’, a group of Canadian researchers found that consuming vegetarian low-cholesterol diets could lower LDL levels for people with high LDL to a similar extent as the first-generation statins. 345 participants (134 men and 211 postmenopausal women) were followed for a period of 6 months. None of them took medications known to influence serum lipids, except 4 men who were all receiving stable doses of thyroxine and 12 women who were receiving estrogen therapy. 51 participants had been taking statins before the study commenced and had stopped taking the medications at least 2 weeks before the study. Participants were randomized to take either the low-fat control diet or dietary portfolio of cholesterol-lowering foods (including soy proteins, nuts, oats, peas, and beans) with either 2 clinic visits (routine) or 7 clinic visits (intensive) during a 6-month period. The control diet emphasized high fiber and whole grains in the forms of fruits and vegetables but lack of portfolio components. The food components used in the portfolio are cholesterol-lowering foods that are recommended by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States to have a heart health. Analysis showed that the drop in LDL was 3 times higher for participants in the cholesterol-lowering diet groups than those in the control diet group. The reduction of 13 percent in LDL was obtained after only 2 clinic visits, as compared to only 3 percent drop in the control diet group. The researchers stressed that the decrease in LDL levels was approximately half of those observed with early statin trials that were associated with 20 percent reductions in CHD mortality. It also appeared that more frequent clinic visits was unnecessary in getting a significant reduction in LDL. As the participants in the study were predominately white with low to intermediate risk of cardiovascular disease and relatively low in body mass index (BMI), it is unknown that the findings could be generalized to higher-risk, more overweight, or even obese patient populations. Meanwhile, the longer-term effect of the cholesterol-lowering diets compared with conventional dietary advice has not been assessed.
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