What Food In Your Diet Causes High Cholesterol?

You need fat. And a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet is probably making your cholesterol worse.

I talked in my previous articles about how low-fat diets can rob your body of the building blocks for producing proper hormones and healthy tissues (link to part 1). I also told you how statins could cause more problems than they help (link to part 2).

So, let’s take a closer look at your diet and what you can do to help control your cholesterol and take care of the real cause of the problems in your health.

What’s In Your Diet That’s Causing Your High Cholesterol

The Standard American Diet is filled with processed foods, chemicals, preservatives, colors, sugar, and salt. It’s severely lacking in fruits and vegetables, which means you’re missing out on the majority of the vitamins, minerals, probiotics, healthy fats, and phytonutrients necessary to keep you healthy.

These harm your body in multiple ways that raise your cholesterol, so let’s look at some.

Poor Gut Health

Gut health is a mix of healthy probiotics, the ability to absorb nutrients, and proper digestion to avoid cramping, bloating, and constipation.

Many processed foods cause inflammation in your gut, which can tear apart the protective lining that keeps stomach acid and digestive juices from eating away at you. As a result, it can cause constipation, diarrhea, gas, bloating, weight gain, and contributes to diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, depression, and fatigue. They trigger the body to produce more cholesterol to repair the damage.

Poor food choices change the ecosystem in your body, letting yeasts and harmful bacteria flourish while starving the good ones. A diet filled with fruits and vegetables helps restore your gut health.

Inflammation

Throughout your body, your immune system reacts to foods and the damage they cause. Some people feel achy and inflamed after eating bread, pasta, ice cream, or other unhealthy foods.

As you calm down the inflammation in the body by eating a healthier diet, the overall inflammation in our body goes down, then your cholesterol goes down. You can see this in as little as a few days with the right diet plan.

We saw this most prominently with COVID. The virus causes severe inflammation in the airway. Studies correlated that people with a poor diet lacking vitamins and minerals had the worst inflammation and mortality.

Damaging Triggers

Smoking, alcohol, drugs, and a lack of exercise are obvious risk factors for high cholesterol and being overweight. Some things you need to just cut out (like smoking), others you should cut back (like alcohol).

Pay closer attention to your food. Pesticides, herbicides, preservatives, and artificial colors and flavors all contribute to damage within your body. That’s why a diet filled with fruits and vegetables is better.

Not Enough Movement

When the doctors talk about your cholesterol, probably one of the first things they say is to lose weight. Excess weight causes damage to your joints and muscles, creating more need to rebuild tissues. It’s fortunate the same exercise that helps reduce your weight can help reduce your cholesterol. And it can help reduce the risk of many other diseases.

You need to move, get some exercise in. The best way to start is to stand up every 20 minutes and walk around a bit. Then, you can begin to put together a more detailed exercise plan that really builds muscle.

Nutrient Deficient

The worst advice to get your cholesterol down is to avoid fat (or cholesterol). To be healthy, your body needs healthy fats.

If you don’t get enough fat in your diet, one of the first ways you’ll suffer is a lack of sustained energy. Without fat, your body craves more food and more sweet foods, which will make you gain weight. But, in the long-term, a low-fat diet robs your body of brain-supporting protection and the hormones that keep you sharp and mentally healthy.

What’s The Best Cholesterol Diet?

It all comes down to balance within your diet. Fat is a necessary component of a healthy diet, combined with eating fresh fruits and vegetables and healthy protein. If you start focusing on these foods, you will take a significant step toward your goal of getting healthy.

But everybody’s health is different and your dietary needs can change throughout your life. That’s why I recommend calling Weighless MD so we can put together a personalized diet plan for you. Some people might need more meat and protein, while others need more whole grains. Most people benefit from eating fermented foods and getting the right supplements.

We do testing to determine what type of diet will help you the most and what supplements are necessary for rebuilding and rebalancing.  The better you feel, the more likely you are to continue eating healthy and exercising.

Crash diets don’t work. You must be strategic and understand how the body works so that you can utilize abnormal fats stores for calories, not normal fat stores and muscle.  We get people in a healthier metabolic state quick and teach them how to maintain long term health.

That’s why I want you to give us a call, so we can talk about a sustainable, healthy diet that will help you to lose weight and get your cholesterol down really fast, naturally.