What Can I Do to Lower My Cholesterol?

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Chicago, IL what can I do to Lower my Cholesterol? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times Best selling author, celebrity 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.

Diane.

Hastings emailed in what can I do to lower my cholesterol? I've been following your diet at about 80% for six years. What I do best are your Paleo shakes for breakfast, your collagen powder, extra fiber, healthy fats, and I walk a lot. My cholesterol level has always been on the higher side, but it just crossed the line and my doctor wants to put me on medication. Besides coming clean and doing 100%, is there anything special I can be doing or eating to help? I do not want to take medication if I can avoid it. Love your new daily podcast. You are so generous with all the information you share. Thank you. And thank you Diane Hastings, and I'll be right back with the answer.

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All right, this is an awesome question. I love it so much. Here are all the things you want to look at. First of all, you want to make sure that you're tracking the right numbers. Of course, what you measure and monitor, you can improve. So let's make sure that we're measuring, monitoring the right things. We improve the right thing. When you talk about your cholesterol, I'm not quite sure what you're talking about. And here are the different things that you want to consider. It's not just about looking at your total cholesterol. It's about looking at how it breaks down. And it's not just about looking at LDL and hdl. It's about actually digging into those numbers and finding out both the size and the number, the particle number and size within those. Here's the reason. Big fluffy particles don't attach to your lining, don't pit your endothelial lining, and create the problems. It's the small, dense ones that do. We used to think that LDL was bad cholesterol and HDL was good cholesterol. But now we know it's really more about the particle size and number. And that's why it's so important, because you may have higher ldl, but it's all big and fluffy and that's okay. So this is what you want to look at, is not just your ldl. You got to break it into the big fluffies and the small dents and how many of those small dents you have small, dense particles. You also want to look at HDL because you want to have higher HDL with more of those big fluffies. Okay, so that's the first thing. The next thing is One of the numbers that's really important here, it's the most atherogenic protein you can have. Bad, that means not good, is something called lipoprotein little L, little A lp. So you want to always check that too. That is one that can be super problematic. So we want to make sure that that one's low. Other numbers that are important here are fibrinogen, homocysteine, hscrp, highly sensitive C reactive protein for inflammation and ferritin. Also triglycerides, of course. And you'll want to look at your genetics, especially something called Apoe 4, because that's going to tell how well you handle your fats and then insulin and blood sugar. Okay, so those are the numbers we're going to be looking at because they give you a bigger picture of what the heck is going on. All right, and then here's the things that make a difference. Number one, estrogen. Here's the thing. Women worry so much about breast cancer and heart disease kills more of us than breast cancer does. So what we want to make sure of is one of the things that you'll see is when estrogen starts to drop in menopause. This puts a risk to your brain, your heart and your bones. So work with your bioidentical hormone doctor, see if you can do stuff to help with estrogen. There's also some dietary factors that can help support estrogen as well. So estrogen is one thing here. And you'll see when estrogen starts to drop, things like LP go up. Next thing is exercise. So I was thrilled to see that you're exercising on a regular basis. Exercise is important for having good HDL and good triglycerides. Right. So exercise is super duper important then. Next thing, of course, is managing stress. If you are stressed out, you can raise your cholesterol just from the stress. So watch your stress levels. Do some yoga and deep breathing. I'm happy to report that I've continued on my yoga journey, which is super big for me. All right, next, your diet. Yes, this makes a big, big, big difference. So I'm so glad you brought it up. Lots of plants, plants from the rainbow, lots of non starchy vegetables, a little bit of fruit, things like berries of course are best. And then high fiber foods, especially beans and oatmeal. Slow cooking oatmeal can help a lot here. And then of course, good healthy fats, especially from avocado, which is a two for one because of all the fiber in it as well. Nuts and seeds, and especially seeds because they've got good Omega 3s in them. Cold water fish, pastured meats, and I want you to think of those meats as condominium. I'm shouting out Dr. Mark Hyman on that one. I love it, how he called it. Condominium supplements. That can help here. Of course, we want to get the antioxidants from the rainbow of vegetables and a little bit of fruit, but you probably want to take extras that can help lower that highly sensitive C reactive protein. The big shout out I'm going to do here is on tocotrienol. So notrienols can help support healthy cholesterol levels. And then of course, making sure that you lower, you know, any kind of damaged fats you do not want to be eating. Damaged fats, oxidized fats, that's super important. Lower your sugar intake and sugar sneaks into places you would never expect. So this is where you want to look at the Sugar Impact diet that I wrote, written by yours truly that helps you get rid of your sweet tooth and find out where all that sugar is hiding and get it out. And then improving your omega 3 index. That's a test you can ask your functional medicine doctor for. And a lot of times that means that we are going to supplement with additional Omega 3s, specifically from Clean Fish. There you go. Lots of things that you can do. There's so much that you can do that will help you get your cholesterol levels to where you want to be. This is JJ with Asking the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribe to JJ.com.

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