Challenging Cholesterol Myths: Transform Your Heart Health and Fitness

Unlock the secrets to maintaining heart health as we bust some of the biggest myths about cholesterol! Ever wondered if cutting out eggs truly lowers your cholesterol? Think again. I'm Anthony Ament, your guide on Health and Fitness Redefined, and today we challenge conventional beliefs about dietary cholesterol. Join us as we dive into the balance between LDL and HDL lipids, exploring how incorporating unsaturated fats—like those found in nuts—can be a game-changer. Plus, learn to navigate the hidden dangers of trans fats lurking in unsuspecting foods like commercial peanut butter.

But we're not just about heart health; we're transforming lives through fitness, too. We'll share how embracing a more active lifestyle can elevate your confidence, boost your energy, and help you overcome feelings of unhealthiness and depression. Our goal is to inspire you to live longer and feel better, setting a vibrant and healthy example for the next generation. Don't miss out on these empowering insights and practical tips—subscribe now and share your quick tip episode suggestions with us via email. Let's embark on this transformative journey together!

Chapters

• 0:16 Understanding and Managing Cholesterol Levels
• 9:31 Empowering Health and Fitness Transformation

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:16

Hello and welcome to Health and Fitness Redefined. I'm your host, Anthony Ament, and welcome to another quick tip episode. Today we are going to talk if you didn't read the topic all about how to lower your cholesterol. But first it's important to know about what is cholesterol and without diving into the nitty gritty, boring things that are just going to brush by your hair and be like, okay, what's hair? But anyway, we'll brush by your waistline and be like, okay, whatever, I'm not interested, we're just going to talk about the basics. So, basically, most of the cholesterol your body forms is fat formed through your liver and what it is is it's basically fatty tissue that goes between your veins and it can clog over time and that can lead to cardiovascular disease over a longer period of time. So, first and foremost, a lot of you go to the doctor, you get blood work and you find out, oh, I have high cholesterol. High cholesterol changes the parameters little by little about what's considered high nowadays, but typically we say 200. Anything above 200 is considered being on the higher side, therefore a higher risk of a heart attack or a stroke, where normally you want to be below that. So you find out you have high cholesterol and it's okay. What can I do to help lower my cholesterol? What are some easy ways? The first thing I always hear from people is I need to cut out cholesterol out of my food, so all my diet, I'm just going to take out cholesterol and then I'll be good and I'll get back to a healthier life. Well, I'm doing this episode because I got bad news for you. That is not the answer. Yeah, I'm going to repeat that. That is not the answer you want to do.

Speaker 1: 2:09

Studies have shown time and time again, especially through eggs, that dietary cholesterol plays little to no impact over how high your cholesterol is. So if you went to eggs and you saw that it had 100% of your recommended amount of cholesterol in one egg, having an egg a day isn't going to raise your cholesterol. In fact, not having that yolk, you're going to get rid of the vital nutrients that come from the yolk of an egg. A lot more nutrients are found in the yolk than they are found in the whites. The whites are higher in protein, but the yolk is very dense with a lot more nutrients. So it's super important to make sure you're having at least some kind of yolks in your diet, but the cholesterol is not impacting. So total cholesterol is a balance between LDL and HDL.

Speaker 1: 3:08

What is LDL and HDL? Ldl is low-density lipids, while HDL is high-density lipids. Easiest way to remember what's good, what's bad H stands for happy, L stands for lousy. So my lousy lipids I want to have less of and my happy lipids I want to have more. The correlation between LDLs and HDLs is actually more likely found inside fats, but there's different types of fats and this is where diet can play a role.

Speaker 1: 3:40

So without, like I said, I'm trying to keep this basic. So if you're a doctor, a nurse, you're in our field and you're like well, that's not necessarily true. I'm keeping it broad for the general public right now. If you want more information, you really want to dive into the science of it, please reach out. I'd be happy to answer it for you, but simplistic terms to answer it for you, but simplistic terms and just trying to summarize this, is increasing your HDLs, which are found in unsaturated fats, are actually going to help lower and eat up and I'm going to put that in little quotation marks eat up your LDLs.

Speaker 1: 4:19

So you want a higher amount of unsaturated HDLs and you want a lower amount of saturated or LDLs, and this is where your food is going to play an important role. So things such as red meat red meat is higher in saturated fats and lower in unsaturated fats saturated fats and lower in unsaturated fats. That proportion is more towards your unhealthier fats as opposed to chicken, which is considered a leaner meat and has less fat overall, and even a slightly higher amount of unsaturated fats in certain leaner meats. A good food fat is very, very, very high. Unsaturated or healthy fats is nuts. Nuts can have, depending on the type of nut way higher amounts of unsaturated fats and actually could help clear up a lot of the issues that are associated with high cholesterol. So they are something you're going to have, but obviously not too much of a good thing. A handful of nuts a day is going to be very beneficial for those that have higher cholesterol.

Speaker 1: 5:23

There is something also called VLDLs, and certain blood work will show this. You just have to ask your physician to run it for you. Vldls are very low density. Those are the ones that are very lousy for you, so those are the ones you want to stay away from. Those kind of come from trans fats. Trans fats can be found, yet again, in red meats and a lot of fried food. So if you're going to McDonald's and you're having potato french fries and they're super fried in the oil, the oil drenching that fry is actually going to have that trans fat in it, depending on, obviously, what kind of oil they're using, but most of the time it is in there.

Speaker 1: 6:02

Another common household item that has trans fats in it is peanut butter. Yeah, peanut butter. I'm not talking about your peanuts that are crushed up and sold as peanut butter. I'm talking about your Jif. I'm talking about your peanut pan. The oils they use are unsaturated. Those oils are actually higher in trans fats, and trans fats are horrible for you and are something you do want to avoid.

Speaker 1: 6:34

When you're reading labels and you've heard me talk about this before labels don't have to show they have any. I it's say trans fats, for example. If it's below 0.5 grams in a serving, then they can put it at zero. They just lower the serving a little bit and and then it says trans fats, zero grams. So it's kind of difficult to tell about if something has trans fats without reading the ingredients, and this is where it comes in to play. It's super important, guys. You just want to find things that say ingredients peanuts. Easy Ingredients peanuts. There you go. Now you got your peanut butter, so be careful what you're reading. Same thing with meats A gram of trans fats can do a lot of damage to your body even one gram. So please be careful of how much of that you're getting in your foods.

Speaker 1: 7:30

Another thing to consider is, like I said, we want to have more LDLs Sorry, not LDLs. We want to have more ldls. We want to have sorry, not lds. We want to have more hdls. We want to have those nuts. We really want to help increase the dietary cholesterol, but we know now that dietary cholesterol does not play a role. Another thing that plays a role is actually type 2 diabetes, so having that as an underlying condition can help increase your risk of having high cholesterol. So doing things like exercise and walking and keeping your body overall healthy are going to play a lot bigger roles in lowering your cholesterol.

Speaker 1: 8:01

There are people who do have a genetic predisposition to high cholesterol. This is where there still needs to be more research done, because some people, no matter how healthy they are, no matter how good their diet is, are always going to have higher rates of cholesterol in their body. Your liver is just producing a lot of it. So it's one really important now that you keep the 20% that's not genetic in check by making sure you're staying healthy, by making sure you're eating the right kinds of meats, by making sure you're staying healthy, by making sure you're eating the right kinds of meats. And two, just constantly going to your doctor and trying to make sure you're on the right track with how you're going and how your overall cholesterol levels or your LDL cholesterols are. How high is bad.

Speaker 1: 8:49

When it comes to being a genetic problem, it really comes down to, like I said, whether your parents suffered from heart attacks or what their cholesterol was like. Were they able to sustain healthy lives living at 220, 230 grams of cholesterol in their blood? So it really depends on your genetics. It's going to just depend on your overall health. But the moral of the story is stay healthy, work out, eat right. Don't worry about eating those eggs. It's not going to raise your cholesterol. Throw that myth out of your mind. We know now dietary cholesterol does not increase your cholesterol. It's more important to focus on the higher amounts of saturated fats.

Speaker 1: 9:31

And that concludes this quick tip episode. We'll dive more into this in a future topic, but I wanted to leave it there. So thank you, guys for listening to this episode. Please hit that subscribe button and if you have any recommendations for future quick tip episodes, don't forget shoot me an email healthfitnessredefinedpodcastatgmailcom. Again, healthfitnessredefined with a D podcast at gmailcom. Until next time For us, we know what it's like to feel unhealthy, depressed and downright defeated. We want to show others there is a right way and through fitness you can do anything you set your mind to. Fitness can give you that motivation, confidence, energy you need to bridge that mental gap and prevent you from missing important life events. We understand it's about feeling better, living longer and being good examples for our kids. We understand this because we live it, and for us that's the Redefined Difference.