How To Raise Your Good Cholesterol (HDL) To Prevent Heart Disease
My oatmeal recipe is 3/4 cup of oats and 1 1/2 cups of water in a big glass bowl, zapped in the microwave for 4 minutes. The bowl has to be much bigger than otherwise necessary for that amount of oatmeal because the oatmeal mixture bubbles while it’s cooking and would make a mess in the microwave oven if it were in a smaller vessel. Once the 4 minutes cooking time is up, I add salt, 5 to 10 stevia drops, a handful of nuts and a handful of frozen blueberries. You might like your blueberries cooked, but I like them firm and raw. The mix of hot oatmeal and cold blueberries is a nice contrast and the blueberries help to cool the oatmeal so I can get right to the eating phase of breakfast without a long wait for the oatmeal to cool.
After a year of these dietary changes, and with sustained but not increased regular exercise and weight control, my HDL has risen to 46. My bad cholesterol stayed at a low 108 and my blood pressure remained normal. The ratio between your good and bad cholesterol is as important or more important than the absolute level of either, so it’s great my HDL came up while my LDL stayed low. Every point of additonal HDL lowers your heart attack risk by 3 percentage points, according to some experts, so my 12 point gain is making me really happy.
I think this will prove to be a sustainable way to keep up my HDL and it may continue to rise. I hope so. Anything you can do to add other high flavanoid foods such as fruits and vegetables, will also help. Green tea is supposed to be good also. There are other aspects of the blueberries, nuts, and raw chocolate that are heart-healthy (because of the fiber and the anti-oxidants) but you can Google those on your own (Google search box at upper right).
Other things I am doing that may be helping raise HDL: I added olive oil to my diet. My favorite afternoon snack is organic popcorn popped in a Stir Crazy popcorn popper and flavored with olive oil and salt. No butter. It’s really quite tasty if you select an olive oil with appealing taste. You don’t have to buy the fancy expensive olive oil but it does pay to try different ones to find a flavor you like. Olive oil really varies in flavor. Some are downright spicey hot, as if cayenne had been added! That’s nice for a change. You can also add hot sauce to your popcorn sometimes. It’s good! The olive oil makes it a satisfying snack. There are some real calories there, but I would eat something caloric between lunch and dinner anyway so this new habit is not making me gain weight.
I also take fish oil supplements. These are heart healthy, even if their effect on HDL is unproven. I’m a vegetarian so I have no fish in my diet. There are non-animal sources for the oil components in fish oil, but I’m just not that much of a purist — I’ll take the capsules with real fish oil in them. I take what’s called an “enteric capsule” so the fish oil is released in my intestines and not in my stomach, preventing the fishy burps that fish oil supplement otherwise can cause.
Another strategy that I tried, and abandoned, for raising HDL was niacin supplements. What a trip that was! In order to get the HDL raising bang for your niacin buck you have to take the type of niacin and the dosage level that makes you flush — your face turns red and you feel prickly. It’s harmless, but unpleasant, and therefore not sustainable in my opinion. But the studies say it works. It’s medicine, even though you can get it over the counter and it’s a vitamin, so if you are going to go the niacin route, do so under your doctor’s supervision. My doctor had no problem with me trying it. There are forms of niacin that don’t make you flush. They also don’t raise your HDL, according to the studies I read. And I think low doses of niacin also will not work.
A little background on HDL and LDL: LDL cholesterol (low density lipoprotein — the bad stuff) contributes to clogging your arteries by encouraging sticky plaque to line your artery walls. HDL (high density lipoprotein — the good stuff) scours the arteries and fights the tendency to clog them up. If your HDL is low, then you need a lower LDL level than most people to have a good risk profile. Adding barley to your diet lowers LDL.
If you drink alcohol to raise your HDL, bear in mind that no more than 2 glasses of wine per day for males or 1 glass for females, is optimal. Heavier drinking is a bad idea.
I encourage you to do your own research. The internet offers lots of great information on health issues like this. and when you are ready to act, online shopping is the easiest way to find thinks like raw dark chocolate powder for making hot chocolate or stevia drops for sweetening it.
For me the solution was blueberries, nuts, and my special recipe for hot chocolate with stevia. Lots of hot chocolate.
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