Low Cholesterol Foods and Recipes
If you have seen your doctor recently to get the results of your cholesterol blood test, then it’s probably because you have some questions about your diet, the part cholesterol plays in your diet, and have more questions about which foods lower cholesterol and how you can change your cooking to a low cholesterol diet.
Now, consuming a healthy diet can be very straight forward. First of all it should be a diet that contains lots of fresh fruits and vegetables (the healthy carbohydrates), as well as 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 recipes and your cooking, you need to try to include as many low cholesterol foods as you can, while you also work on decreasing the volume of high cholesterol foods.
This will result in a decreasing of the risk that you have for heart attacks and strokes.
The protein that these foods provide is vital 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 have this protein in your diet, but it shouldn’t be from foods that are high in cholesterol available. Seafood can also provide your diet 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 too has protein, but since it is an animal product it too has fat so you need to drink skim milk, or 1% milk instead of whole milk or 2%. If your family is used to drinking the milk with higher fat levels, you may get some complaints begin with, but in time, if you still buy the better choices, they will probably come to accept it.
Instead of cooking with butter (animal product), try using olive oil (plant product) instead, especially the virgin olive oil which is less processed than the light olive oils. You should note that the light olive oil refers to its color, and not the number of calories it contains – very misleading since we usually use light meaning fewer 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 gives you more fruit in your diet too.
Nuts are good for you when you are concerned about lowering your cholesterol, but make sure you only eat a handful a day, or you will be eating too many calories which is never a good idea.
When you are preparing hamburgers, you can throw in some oats, as this is a good 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 barley, apples and pears.
There are a lot more hints and tips about foods with low cholesterol as well as foods to lower cholesterol with recipes here .
Tags: cholesterol, Diet, foods, lower cholesterol
