My Cholesterol Is High and I'm Trying to Avoid Statins. Is There a Diet to Help With This?

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My cholesterol is high and I'm trying to avoid statins. Is there a diet to help with this? This is JJ Virgin, four time New.

York Times bestselling author, celebr, nutrition expert.

And fitness hall of famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Katie from Facebook asks. My cholesterol is high. I'm trying to avoid statins. I need to really clean up my diet. I have an appointment to see my doctor and I still have two more blood tests before I go to see her to compare them. Hoping to get the number down. Is it possible if I follow the sugar impact diet, I can do that. I'm 62 and so far I don't take any medications and I'm desperate to stay off them. Oh my gosh. I am so glad you reached out on this. I have a lot of strategies here that can help. I'll be right back with them.

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All right, Katie, thanks so much for asking this. We actually see this question a lot. So I was definitely excited to dig into cholesterol because first of all, what should you really be looking at when you're looking at cholesterol? You know, I think back, gosh, 20, 30 years ago, and we looked at total cholesterol as the indicator. And then all of a sudden they went, no, it's not total cholesterol. It's really LDL and hdl. And what's going on, you know, is your HDL too high? Is your. I'm sorry, is your LDL too high? Is your HDL too low? And then they went, no, it's not just that. It's also the fractions within those. So we've got total cholesterol. And we know that total cholesterol is made up of a variety of lipoproteins. The most common are HDL and ldl. Now, we used to think LDL was bad and HDL was good, till we found out that actually the size mattered. That small dense particles, whether they were HDL or ldl, could cause problems within the body. Pitting and damage that caused your body to create scar tissue, plaquing that could lead to a heart attack, narrowing of the arteries. So now we know it's not just LDL and hdl. It's the size and the number of those particles. A lot of small, dense particles is a problem. Big fluffy particles, on the other hand, aren't a problem. And so that's the next thing to look at, is not just cholesterol, not just LDL and hdl, but also the particle size and number within those. Another really important number, and Dr. Alan Hopkins has been on this podcast talking about this as the most important. It's the most atherogenic lipoprotein of all, is something called lipoprotein little A. And that's when you really wanna check too super duper important. Along with looking at triglycerides, your blood sugar, your fasting insulin, your iron levels. Yeah. Your homocysteine and fibrinogen. How sticky is your blood? What's your homocysteine looking like? So these are all the numbers. So you really wanna get a complete look at, you know, an expanded cardiovascular panel, not just specific on cholesterol. And then let's look now at what are some of the things, a lot of the things can really make a difference here with this. One of the things you need to know is that if you go through menopause and you aren't doing bioidentical hormones, that when your estrogen goes low, it also tends to kick up, raise small, dense particles, raise lp. So one of the things to think about as you're going through menopause is anything you can do to help your body with estrogen and talk to your functional medicine doctor about bioidentical hormones because they help your brain, they help your heart, and they help your bones. Super duper important. So that's the first thing. Next thing is to, of course, and this is where I love the sugar impact diet for this and is to lower your sugar impact that will raise your triglycerides, create inflammation, create insulin resistance, and start to create more problems cardiovascularly. So super important to have a low sugar impact diet. The two things that are gonna have the biggest impact of things not to eat would be damaged fats, things like oxidized fats. You know, the vegetable oils that are sitting in the glass bottles at the store, the processed foods and the foods that are higher in sugar impact, especially things that are higher in fructose. That would be foods using apple juice concentrate or agave, for example. The things you do want to get into your diet that will help a lot. Clean fish, clean cold water, fatty fish, wild. So things like halibut and salmon. Super important. Taking supplemental fish oil and olive oil, using extra virgin olive oil, good, clean, extra virgin olive oil, make sure it's actually olive oil on your salads is really a big deal. And then eating some legumes. And if you're someone who doesn't eat any beans right now, you can start by giving yourself a tablespoon of legumes a day to condition your gut so it can handle it. So that might be a little bit of black beans, a black bean soup, some hummus, a little bit of beans on a regular basis. And also oatmeal is another one. And I'm not talking the oatmeal in the packet with the sugar. As you know, I'm talking about long cooking. Oats have amazing fiber in them that can help with lowering the bad cholesterol and raising the good cholesterol. So more big fluffy HDLs and helps detoxify as well. So other things that can help here dealing with stress. Stress can raise your cholesterol and one of the big stressors is of course not getting enough sleep. Also, besides eating a good high fiber diet, exercise can help boost the fluffy HDLS as well. So that's another key thing. And then annotocatrienols have some pretty interesting research here to help support a healthy heart. So again, diet, get the sugar out, get the damaged fats out, get in good sources of fiber and healthy clean wild fish, fish oil, olive oil, nuts and seeds of course legumes and oatmeal. And then get your exercise in, manage your stress things like yoga, Tai chi, get good sleep and look at for supplements fish oil and annattotochotrienols and let me know what happens with the next lab test. Let's go. This is JJ with Asking Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetoj.com.

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