Tasty diet to lower cholesterol
When designing your diet to lower cholesterol it will be helpful to realize that there are basically two schools of thought about the best dietary approach to follow. In plain, English there’s…
The Low Fat VS. the Low Carb approaches. You might say it’s the Atkins Diet VS. The American Heart Association Diet. It’s the USDA Food Pyramid recommendations VS. Those who want to re-write the dietary guidelines instituted by the US government in 1992. (That’s the year the USDA first published the Food Pyramid.)
The best diets to lower cholesterol and thus the recommended foods that lower cholesterol all depend on which team you happen to be listening to. (If you stick around it won’t take you long to figure out which side the Healthy fat burner plays on.)
The heavy hitters that have argued for years that the high carbohydrate, low fat approach is the best lower cholesterol solution has been articulated by the American Heart Association and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. These institutions promoted the National Cholesterol Education Program. They are joined by the American Medical Association and their allies of Registered Dieticians, the pharmaceutical companies, large food processing conglomerates, and yes, the United States government as represented by the USDA, FDA and The National Institutes of Health. If you haven’t noticed, these groups also happen to control most of the advertising dollars.
The opposition used to be a few renegade medical research doctors (like Dr.Atkins), and independent medical scientists, researchers and clinicians that kept coming up with experiments and studies that would fly in the face of the conventional wisdom. You can find some of their names here.
“As the data on diet and cholesterol continue to accumulate, the evidence indicates that the high-complex-carbohydrate, low-fat diet doesn’t live up to its billing as a cholesterol solution.” (1.)
In the last few years it has become widely accepted that sugar, refined starches, and partially hydrogenated oils are the primary culprits that raise serum cholesterol levels, not dietary cholesterol itself.
“Are You getting enough Dietary Cholesterol?”
It is now clear that insulin is the major hormone that activates the enzymes required in cholesterol synthesis. Excess insulin circulating in the system stimulates excess cholesterol production. Consuming excess carbohydrates, while decreasing dietary cholesterol intake guarantees a steady overproduction of cholesterol within the body. (2.) You can switch off the enzymes of internal cholesterol synthesis by limiting the amount of sugars and starches in your diet and insuring you get enough dietary cholesterol
