High Cholesterol

scottaworley

Well thought out and coherent. I think the big thing, however, is still fiber (and I will find out in 3 months if it works for me). Anytime you eat a plant based diet you are taking in large amounts of fiber. Your "meat and potatoes" family does not eat a lot of fiber, and they have high cholesterol. I would suggest that you could add significant quantities of meat into your diet (if cholesterol is your only concern - clearly only hypothetical in this situation) while maintaining a high fiber intake and still have well controlled cholesterol.

The fiber thing is true, although I will say that in my immediate family we had a higher-fiber diet, mostly because we weren't exactly rich. I can't say that we ever had totally meatless meals (Well, except for me), but for example a common main dish in our house was beans and/or lentils mixed with a bit of meat (served separately so that none of it made it onto my plate) to make the meat go farther to feed our family (We were a family of 9, so money was very, very tight and meat was more expensive than picking up huge bags of beans and lentils.) So, there was (and still is) plenty of fiber to go around. Even now, my mother has to log everything she eats to make her doctor happy, and she gets about as much fiber as I do on a vegan diet (Usually about 45-50g a day), although some of hers is from stuff like Metamucil and fiber supplements, while mine is all from actual food, which I think is better. Her cholesterol, last I spoke to her about 6 months ago, is still around 480, with a bad LDL/HDL ratio. And that's on statins. However, she has no sign whatsoever of heart disease, no high blood pressure, and the stress echocardiograms have come back showing no lack of oxygen being supplied to her heart muscle, so...yeah. In that sense, she's far better off than I am! *laugh*

As for me, I have no interest whatsoever in eating meat, as I've never eaten it and therefore never developed any kind of taste for it. And I have no interest in developing a taste for it, either. I think it's repulsive, honestly, and look at it the way most people look at Brussels sprouts, but I don't have that opinion for ethical reasons, merely for taste/texture ones. I'm very happy with a low-protein vegan diet...and so are my liver and kidneys. *laugh* As for you, I'd say increasing your fiber, if you don't eat enough, is a good step to take to lower cholesterol, if it's showing signs of damaging you. If it isn't...Well, like I said, my mother's is exorbitantly high, like she should be dead if you heed the cholesterol alarmists, but she's generally in good health, at a healthy weight, etc, in her late 70s, having had such high cholesterol as long as it's been measured.

I like both meat and brussel sprouts