If you have recently seen your doctor for the results of your cholesterol blood test, then it’s probably because you have some valid concerns about your diet, the role cholesterol plays in your diet, and have lots of questions about what foods can lower cholesterol and how you can change your cooking to a more cholesterol friendly diet.

Now, eating a good diet can be very straight forward. First of all you should be eating a diet that contains lots of fresh fruits and vegetables (the healthy carbohydrates), and also protein from legumes (dried beans, peas and lentils), and meats or dairy products.

But this is where the trouble starts. Butter, red meats, poultry and eggs – all animal products contain cholesterol, with butter, egg yolks and red meats being the worst cholesterol offenders.

For your cooking and recipes, you need to try to add some low cholesterol foods, while you also work on decreasing the volume of high cholesterol foods.

The result will be a decreasing of the risk that you have for heart disease.

The protein that these foods provide is very important for the health of your internal organs, and for building strong tendons and muscles, as well as maintaining bones, hair, blood and skin. So, by some means you still need to get this protein in your diet, but it shouldn’t be from high cholesterol foods available. Fish can also supply you with protein, and fish is a good source too, especially herring, sardines, and salmon which contain the omega 3 fatty acids that your body also requires.

Milk also contains protein, but since it is an animal product it too has fat so you should drink skim milk, or 1% milk in place of whole milk or 2%. If your room mates are used to drinking the milk with higher fat levels, you may get some complaints begin with, but given time, if you continue with the healthier choices, they will probably come to adjust to it.

Instead of cooking with butter (animal product), try using olive oil (plant product) in its place, especially the virgin olive oil which is processed less than the light olive oils. In fact the light olive oil refers to the color, and not the number of calories it contains – very misleading when we usually use light meaning less calories.

One way of lowering the fat level in baking is to use apple sauce, pureed prunes, or mashed bananas instead of the fat, and this also increases your fruit in your diet too.

Almonds, walnuts, peanuts and some other nuts are good for you when you are concerned about lowering your cholesterol, but only eat a handful a day, or you will be consuming too many calories which is never a good idea.

If you are making hamburgers, put in some oats, as this is a great food to help you lower your cholesterol. Pulses are legumes as they are also known, or more commonly, dried beans, peas and lentils are also effective cholesterol lowering foods containing soluble fibre, as do apples, pears and barley.

There is plenty more about low cholesterol foods as well as cholesterol lowering foods and recipes here .

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