Cholesterol is a huge problem in Western countries and the problem is spreading from older individuals to younger individuals and from Westerners to Easterners. Health authorities all over the world are warning of the heart disease time bomb that is ticking away. That is all well and good, but the difficulty is is that not a lot of people are taking any notice until it is too late.
One of the biggest worries is that individuals do not think before purchasing a meal or a snack – if they are hungry, they will merely buy a hamburger or a pie. Another big difficulty, is that the generation born in the Seventies did not learn how to cook, but instead depended on junk food. They have also passed that on to their children and so it carries on.
This state of affairs has led to the rise in heart disease. So, what can be done about it? Well, the best thing would be for individuals to go back forty or fifty years and start again, but since that is not possible, it is helpful to look into that earlier lifestyle and see how we differ nowadays from it.
Forty or fifty years ago, there were junk foods, but most people consumed them just very infrequently. They went home to a cooked meal prepared either by their mother or their wife or they cooked it themselves. It is not important who cooked it, the fact that it was cooked at home is the significant bit.
How often do you eat take-aways and how often do you eat home cooked meals – meals that were made from fresh, raw ingredients?
There were not so many labour-saving devices in those days, so people worked harder. ‘Harder” I said, people probably work longer hours now, but they do not expend so many calories. In those days, people walked further and worked more strenuously and ate meals prepared from raw ingredients.
We do not do that now and those are the main reasons why we are all struggling with heart disease. OK, you have to be pretty far gone for it to become too late. You can implement lifestyle changes now and you will recover or you can take tablets and help to make the pharmaceuticals even richer.
If you want to do something about your condition, it is quite simple. The first thing to do is avoid red meat, full-fat dairy produce like milk, cream, butter and cheese and stop eating junk food, such as hamburgers, store-bought pizzas, hot dogs, pies, pasties, crisps and chips entirely. This will greatly reduce most people’s sources of the prime culprits of high cholesterol – namely, saturated fats and hydrogenated,or trans, fats..
The second thing to do is increase your intake of fresh fruit and vegetables. You ought to also eat more peas, beans, lentils, grains and nuts. Soya is also very (very) good for you.
Avoid eating animal skin of all kinds, because a lot of the fat content is in the skin and try to replace red meat dishes with those made using fish, chicken and tofu.
Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on numerous topics, but is now concerned with low cholesterol diet recipes. If you want to know more, please visit our web site at What Foods Lower Cholesterol?