Previously by Margaret Durst: What Our Fingernails Say About Us
It seems like everyone wants to reduce their cholesterol. There are some great natural ways to do this, but everyone is unique — so what works for one, may not work for another. Cholesterol is necessary for many body functions, meaning that you don’t want to reduce it completely, but you don’t want unhealthy levels either.
If you want to work on the cause, a good place to start is looking at the diet. Eliminate foods full of unhealthy transfatty acids and hydrogenated oils which tend to increase cholesterol. These include many fried and convenience foods such as cookies and crackers — read labels.
If both cholesterol and triglycerides are high, there is a good chance that you are insulin resistant or have diabetes — which means you are eating too many refined carbohydrates. A great way to bring both triglycerides and cholesterol down is to balance your diet and take a multi-vitamin for blood sugar control (I recommend one called Gluco Balance) along with a good-quality omega 3 oil.
Another area to consider is how cholesterol is eliminated from the body. Bile from the liver carries the cholesterol to the digestive tract where it is eliminated from the body. Constipation or slow transit time through the digestive tract will cause cholesterol to be reabsorbed rather than eliminated. A good way to work on this issue is to add fiber to the diet. Oat fiber is advertised as a way to lower cholesterol because it will absorb the cholesterol and encourage more regular elimination — but other forms of fiber such as psyllium will work as well. Magnesium supplementation is another way to increase regularity, which can lower cholesterol if poor elimination or constipation is part of the problem.
One of the most common factors I find that leads to high cholesterol levels is poor liver or gallbladder function. There are several common foods in the American diet that cause the bile to congeal and not flow to the digestive tract properly. This can be measured in normal blood tests of liver enzymes using nutritional ranges. If you reduce and / or eliminate coffee (both caffeinated and decaffeinated) and chocolate from your diet and add a supplement to thin the bile so that it flows naturally, you will reduce cholesterol. I have seen good results with a product called Beta TCP and also with lecithin.
