This Week

Lower Your Cholesterol (Without Drugs)

If you’ve had a routine physical in the past five years, you should know your cholesterol level—including total cholesterol and both the LDL (bad) and HDL (good) varieties. To substantially lower your risk for heart attacks, your HDL levels should compose about one-third of your total cholesterol. Most of us fall short of that mark—the average American gets only about 20 percent of their cholesterol level from HDL—but it’s never too late to start making simple changes for better heart health

Try:

Eat oatmeal. Doctors recommend oatmeal as part of a cholesterol-lowering plan because your body needs to use bile acid to digest this complex carb, and—surprise—that acid is actually made up of your body’s cholesterol. Eating a bowl of oatmeal is essentially like taking a sponge to the bad cholesterol that’s in your blood.

Avoid trans fats. These nefarious fats raise your bad cholesterol while lowering your good cholesterol. But don’t blindly trust a “Zero grams of trans fats!” sticker. Federal guidelines allow companies to label their foods as such if the product has fewer than 0.5 grams of trans fats a serving. Skip the label, and go straight to the ingredient list—if it has partially hydrogenated oils, it has trans fats.

Take niacin. This essential B vitamin raises HDL and lowers LDL and triglyceride levels. Take 500 to 2,000 mg daily.

Look for phytosterol-fortified foods. Phytosterols, compounds found naturally in plants, can lower cholesterol 5 percent to 10 percent in just a couple weeks. To get a therapeutic dose, look for foods labeled as phytosterol-fortified, such as a growing number of yogurts, cheeses, cereals, oatmeals, juices, and granola bars.