How to Naturally Lower Your Cholesterol

High cholesterol is one of the biggest health problems of our day. High Cholesterol leads to a variety of problems such as heart disease and even stroke. Fortunately, there are ways today that you can lower your cholesterol, and you can lower your cholesterol naturally without having to rely on drugs.

First of all, it is important to discuss the situation with your doctor. Depending on how high your cholesterol levels are, you might want to consider medications, at least initially, until you are able to get your cholesterol levels under control.

There are essentially two ways that you can lower your cholesterol naturally. Most people need to do at least a little bit of both if they are going to see lower cholesterol levels. Those two ways are through specific lifestyle changes and through nutritional supplements.

The lifestyle changes are probably some of the most difficult ways to lower your cholesterol levels naturally. However, these lifestyle changes also have benefits outside of lowering your cholesterol. First of all, you'll want to watch your diet and the type of food that you eat. You want to make sure that you get around five servings of fruits and vegetables every day. Try to replace processed snacks with fruits and vegetables. Try to keep your diet balanced so that you have the right proportion of fruits and vegetables. There are even some specific foods that you can eat that may help to lower your cholesterol naturally such as olive oil, garlic, avocados, shitake mushrooms, chili peppers, almonds, bran, beans of all sorts, flax seed, onions and even fatty fish.

The next lifestyle change that you can make in order to lower your cholesterol naturally is to exercise and to keep an eye on your weight. Exercising is key to cardiovascular health and it will help to increase the density that you have of HDL, which is the good type of cholesterol. Even 15 minutes, three times a week, can help to lower your cholesterol.

You also want to make sure that you are consuming enough water. Keeping yourself hydrated increases you metabolism, and therefore can help process cholesterol.

You may also be able to lower you cholesterol naturally using a variety of nutritional supplements. Some of the supplements that have been shown to be effective for some people are fish oil supplements because they contain omega 3 fatty acids. You might also consider flax seed as a nutritional supplement to help lower cholesterol naturally. Red yeast rice has also shown that it may have some ability to help reduce your total cholesterol and do it in a natural way. There are also herbs such as guguilipid and policosanol. These two supplements have been shown to help reduce cholesterol in some patients.

Again, if your cholesterol levels are severely high, you'll want to make sure that before you do anything to lower your cholesterol levels naturally you speak to your health care provider.