If you have been diagnosed with high cholesterol, or you simply want to avoid developing high cholesterol levels, then there are foods we can choose to eat that help to lower cholesterol naturally. So lets take a look at these foods!
1) Fish. Straight in at the top of the list is fish, and more specifically fatty fish like salmon, tuna. mackerel and herring. Fatty fish are a great source of polyunsaturated fats called omega 3 fatty acids. Omega 3 fatty acids are actually essential to our health and if we get plenty of them in our diet they will help us to maintain healthy cholesterol levels and go a long way to promote heart health. People who eat diets rich in fish, such as the Mediterranean diet, are among the most heart healthy people in world. They have much lower cholesterol, blood pressure levels than those who eat diets rich in saturated fats.
2) Apples, and especially cloudy apple juice, are among the great foods that lower cholesterol naturally. There has been a handful of studies that have all experimented to see if apple juice helps to lower cholesterol levels and all these studies have found that apple juice actually does. The studies have also found that cloudy apple juice (made from apples juiced with their skins on) is considerably more effective than clear apple juice (made from apples that have been peeled). So whats the difference? Apple peel is a concentrated source of a proven cholesterol lowering form of fiber called pectin. Pectin helps a lot because in the intestines it absorbs some of the cholesterol from the food we eat that makes it to the intestines. Once absorbed by pectin, the cholesterol cannot pass through the intestine wall into the blood stream like it would normally, therefore lowering the amount of cholesterol in the blood stream. From the results of the studies it appears that a daily fresh cloudy 8oz apple juice is a good dose for lowering cholesterol naturally.
3) Tomatoes, and tomato products are excellent foods for lowering cholesterol levels as shown by a Finnish study. In this study, volunteers were given a daily dose of 1 ounce of tomato ketchup and a 13oz glass of tomato juice for a period of 3 weeks. At the end of the 3 weeks every volunteer displayed a remarkable drop in total cholesterol levels and an even more significant drop in LDL ‘bad’ cholesterol levels. Tomatoes may also help to lower levels of another kind of fat found in the blood stream called triglycerides. Those of us with high cholesterol levels generally have high triglyceride levels too. To learn more about triglycerides visit how to lower triglycerides levels naturally.