Do your cholesterol numbers really matter all that much? Every five years the U.S. Department of Health does a review of dietary guidelines the government provides to help Americans live healthier lives. The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee recently made a report concerning fat. Some news articles reported that a low fat diet wasn’t necessarily healthy. But if you read the original report, you would see what they were stressing was there are two sides to the “fat diet” coin. When reading about fats, most of the time the articles are talking about the bad ones. Don’t let that confuse you. There are some bad fats and there are some good ones. The most commonly eaten bad fat comes from the saturated fats found in red meat, cheese, cream, butter and margarine, plus most of the foods that are fried. (even green fried tomatoes). While the good fats are the monounsaturated fats, the polyunsaturated fats, and Omega fats found in nuts, olives and the cooking oils – Olive and Canola. The lesson to learn is that the bad fats that you eat cause your bad “lethal” LDL cholesterol to become elevated. Remember, these are the “splinter” particles that get into the walls of your arteries. You want to avoid them like the plague because they cause inflammation or plaque formation in your arteries. In like mind, realize the good fats cause an increase in your good “hero” HDL cholesterol. These are the particles that act like little patrol cars that float around in your blood stream and pick up LDL cholesterol particles out of the walls of your arteries. The HDL carries these splinters to the “liver jail” to be disposed of. Your cholesterol numbers actually do matter. Read Prescription For Life and learn how to get your LDL as low as possible and your HDL as high as you can. Numbers do count.
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