Cholesterol

[pariolly]

What is the best source for lowering cholesterol? After trying the Omega-3, I have been told that Red Rice Yeast, flaxseed oil, Co-q 10 and Niacin are also effective. Aside from diet and exercise, which of these are better at reducing your cholesterol?

[LiveVegan]

Avoiding cholesterol would be your first and best line of defense. If you are eating meat and dairy, you are eating the only source of cholesterol. And it will plague up your arteries.

If you are a vegan or vegetarian, then I would try exercising which will increase your "good" cholesterol to assist you in bringing down the "bad".

If you aren't a vegan or at least a vegetarian and your numbers are still high, then I have no suggestions for you other then to do so. If you refuse to eliminate cholesterol from your diet then your health isn't as important to you as you thought it was.

Good luck.

[panthera]

Great post, LiveVegan!

[teddy bear]

Cholesterol is a very coplicated matter. My co-worker, vegetarian who eats vegan at work and doesn't eat egg, dairy, and meat, just is not very picky if a processed food has some slight amounts of egg, milk or whey in it, has high cholesterol. So vegans can also have cholesterol problems.

I have read that there is no good and bad cholesterol, both have their function in the body. Also, body produces it's own cholesterol and your diet affects your cholesterol levels by just 5%. Every cell can produce cholesterol, and this production is aided by production in the liver. High cholesterol can be a result of a disfunction on a cellular level where cells cannot absorb the choesterol from the blood (and that cholesterol is absolutely vital for their survival, brain cells extremely benefit from cholesterol).

Best thing to do would be to go to a really good doctor/specialist and maybe get a prescription drug. Those can be very dangerous for your body, especially for the liver, so get some information and choose your drug wisely, because there are hundreds of them. Also, drugs battle cholesterol in different ways, that's why it's crucial that your doctor tries to find the real cause of high cholesterol. High cholesterol might even be a body's response to internal infection, meaning even antibiotics can be helpful in reducing cholesterol in that case.

Of course, you may also try to find alternative methods, like the ayurveda approach. In fact, I suggest this approach before trying conventional drugs.

And as for going vegan, although it is pretty irrelevant when it comes to cholesterol, you should do it for the well-being of animals. We should mind their interests irrelevant of the benefits or harms we have from using tissues taken from their corpses.