More ideas & NEWS on boosting your HDL’s….
Welcome to our health & self help blog.
Focus on Your Health:
In it we post health commentary & reviews of books, eBooks, & other things that improve or protect your health or which enable you to live longer, to be more prosperous, & to be more effective.
Today's post: Wednesday, 11-1-2006
More ideas & NEWS on boosting your HDL’s….
For those of you who didn’t see our earlier post or don’t know that a fraction of your HDL cholesterol will clean your arteries & protect you from heart attacks, strokes, & other cardiovascular diseases, research seems to show that it does just that.
And, evidence is even coming in that having a high HDL cholesterol level of over 60, or even better, over 80, is MORE protective than having a low level of the bad LDL cholesterol or low total cholesterol.
This is also measured by dividing your total cholesterol by your HDL. If the result is 3.0 or less, your chance of heart disease is relatively low. If the result is 6.0 or higher, your risk of heart disease is also quite high.
So, if your total cholesterol is 240 but your HDL is 80 or more, you have lower risk of heart disease. But if at 240 total cholesterol, your HDL is 40 or less, you may be at serious risk of heart disease or already have it whether it shows yet or not.
So, what if your HDL level is low?
Mercifully, there are several things you can do that tend to increase it.
Exercise is known to increase not just your HDL readings in general; but to increase the exact protective fraction of your HDL that you most want to increase.
(See our recent series of posts on exercise which ran starting Tuesday, 10-12-2006 & ended Monday, this week on 10-30-2006. They have many other benefits of exercise from helping you think better to being sexier. And several of them have tips on getting yourself to actually exercise & making it more doable to do.)
In addition to that & the other ways to boost your HDL levels, here are some more:
1. As you likely know if you have read this blog often, I think nondrug methods of improving health are often preferable to using drugs for several reasons.
However, there are good drugs. And, if they are used properly for the right reasons they are often extremely effective.
Just today, I got a report on what may be the best new drug to prevent or treat heart & cardiovascular disease:
New drug raises HDL & reduces small particle LDL
A new medication, torcetrapib, in 90 mg doses raised HDL by over 50 percent.
So someone with an HDL of 38 might wind up with an HDL of 60.
Even better, it sharply lowered the amount of the more dangerous small particle LDL & lowered the total LDL somewhat.
It’s new & may not yet be generally available nor are all the side effects in large groups of people known yet.
(The test patients were reported as having little trouble with the 90 mg dose that was most effective in boosting HDL.)
But if you can’t exercise more or are reluctant to take the supplements that raise HDL &have low HDL levels, it sounds like a drug well worth asking your doctor about.
And, there is another exciting implication of this new drug’s positive test. Exercise & some of the supplements that raise your HDL may use the same biochemical pathway this drug uses. And, so they may well both raise your protective HDL fraction & reduce the dangerous small particle LDL as this drug does.
I’m not sure about the other supplements that do. But of those that raise your HDL, I suspect niacin, inositol hexaniacinate, & the other B complex vitamins are quite possibly in this group.
People taking them tend to have their LDL cholesterol levels lowered & be less likely to develop heart disease as well as having their HDL levels increased.
2. In the same Medscape enewsletter that had the news about the new drug, there was an article that said your HDL is MUCH more protective if it carries lots of antioxidants.
So, whatever your HDL levels are, the more vegetables & fruits you eat that are high in antioxidants & the more natural vitamin C & vitamin E (tho only up to 200 iu daily to be safe) & other antioxidant supplements you take, the more protective your HDL level that you already have will be.
3. Recently I got an article in my email, also the Medscape eletter, with some interesting info on HDL:
"Patients with insulin resistance, especially those with the metabolic syndrome or type 2 diabetes mellitus, often present with an atherogenic lipid profile that is not dominated by hypercholesterolaemia, but rather by low levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) chol-esterol, elevated triglycerides and a lipoprotein sub-profile characterised by small, dense LDL.[5]
HDL cholesterol exerts a range of anti-atherosclerotic effects in the arterial wall,[6] and large observational studies conducted over several decades have established a low level of HDL cholesterol beyond doubt as an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease....
"This suggests several things to me if your HDL levels are low or proving hard to increase..
a. If you haven't yet had them checked, it might be worth checking your triglycerides, fasting glucose, & HBA1C.
If these faactors are too high, it can damage your health. They can be lowered without drugs. (Eating very little or no sugar or foods with refined grains & doing regular exercise, particularly strength training, help a lot. And, alpha lipoic acid & chromium polynicotinate & some other supplements also help.)
So making sure your triglycerides, fasting glucose, & HBA1C are low enough might boost your HDL; & would definitely be heart protective.
(I'm not sure about the danger level for triglycerides; but I think desirable is less than 100. Fasting glucose should definitely be lower than 100; & the HBA1C, a 60 to 90 moving average of your glucose based on red blood cells, should definitely be 5.9 or lower.)
b. This info also suggests that doing strength training with weights would boost your HDL due to the effect of such exercises on reducing insulin resistance. Plus, I think such exercise is most likely to boost HDL in other ways.
4. A friend who has been having trouble boosting his low HDL also said he recently had read that eating an unusually lowfat diet tended to produce low HDL levels also.
This is definitely the case. And, I’ve not covered it in these posts on boosting your HDL levels as yet.
Increasing your intake of “healthy” fats & oils can solve that problem for you & has many other benefits.
If you aren't allergic, eating nuts has all sorts of health benefits.
And eating a lot of vegetables & lean protein helps lower LDL's but can also lower HDL's if the fat content is too low.
Adding nuts adds all their numerous health benefits & tends to raise HDL or prevent it from falling. And, the sterols in nuts LOWER LDL's.
Also, you may have seen the headlines that eating vegetables helps prevent mental aging.
Upon closer reading, it seems that the people who ate lots of vegetables tended to eat salads & salad greens, which the researchers believe they ate with salad dressing. They theorize that helps deliver the antioxidants in the vegetables. In fact, salad greens were shown most effective in the study.
Extra virgin olive oil works best to deliver the antioxidants in vegetables & adds antioxidants of its own when used in cooking vegetables & in salad dressings. Extra virgin olive oil also is far safer to eat than the polyunsaturated oils like soy, corn, & safflower. Like them, extra virgin olive oil lowers LDL's when eaten instead of butter. Unlike them it boosts HDL's instead of lowering them.
(Oils like soy, corn, & safflower used to be popular with doctors as they lower LDL’s when used instead of butter. But they also LOWER your protective HDLs.)
Lastly, eating foods high in Omega 3’s like wild caught salmon, sardines, & oysters I found out recently, has many health benefits as does taking purified fish oil directly or in capsules as purified fish oil is high in omega 3 fatty acids also.
Most people in the United States eat too many of the less desirable oils like soy, corn, & safflower & get too much of the omega 6 fatty acids they contain & also get much too little omega 3 fatty acids.
So eating more foods with omega 3 fatty acids is an excellent way to boost your HDL levels & enjoy extra health benefits besides.
*********
We’ll post a bit of an overview of our posts on boosting HDL’s next time.
Focus on Your Health:
In it we post health commentary & reviews of books, eBooks, & other things that improve or protect your health or which enable you to live longer, to be more prosperous, & to be more effective.
Today's post: Wednesday, 11-1-2006
More ideas & NEWS on boosting your HDL’s….
For those of you who didn’t see our earlier post or don’t know that a fraction of your HDL cholesterol will clean your arteries & protect you from heart attacks, strokes, & other cardiovascular diseases, research seems to show that it does just that.
And, evidence is even coming in that having a high HDL cholesterol level of over 60, or even better, over 80, is MORE protective than having a low level of the bad LDL cholesterol or low total cholesterol.
This is also measured by dividing your total cholesterol by your HDL. If the result is 3.0 or less, your chance of heart disease is relatively low. If the result is 6.0 or higher, your risk of heart disease is also quite high.
So, if your total cholesterol is 240 but your HDL is 80 or more, you have lower risk of heart disease. But if at 240 total cholesterol, your HDL is 40 or less, you may be at serious risk of heart disease or already have it whether it shows yet or not.
So, what if your HDL level is low?
Mercifully, there are several things you can do that tend to increase it.
Exercise is known to increase not just your HDL readings in general; but to increase the exact protective fraction of your HDL that you most want to increase.
(See our recent series of posts on exercise which ran starting Tuesday, 10-12-2006 & ended Monday, this week on 10-30-2006. They have many other benefits of exercise from helping you think better to being sexier. And several of them have tips on getting yourself to actually exercise & making it more doable to do.)
In addition to that & the other ways to boost your HDL levels, here are some more:
1. As you likely know if you have read this blog often, I think nondrug methods of improving health are often preferable to using drugs for several reasons.
However, there are good drugs. And, if they are used properly for the right reasons they are often extremely effective.
Just today, I got a report on what may be the best new drug to prevent or treat heart & cardiovascular disease:
New drug raises HDL & reduces small particle LDL
A new medication, torcetrapib, in 90 mg doses raised HDL by over 50 percent.
So someone with an HDL of 38 might wind up with an HDL of 60.
Even better, it sharply lowered the amount of the more dangerous small particle LDL & lowered the total LDL somewhat.
It’s new & may not yet be generally available nor are all the side effects in large groups of people known yet.
(The test patients were reported as having little trouble with the 90 mg dose that was most effective in boosting HDL.)
But if you can’t exercise more or are reluctant to take the supplements that raise HDL &have low HDL levels, it sounds like a drug well worth asking your doctor about.
And, there is another exciting implication of this new drug’s positive test. Exercise & some of the supplements that raise your HDL may use the same biochemical pathway this drug uses. And, so they may well both raise your protective HDL fraction & reduce the dangerous small particle LDL as this drug does.
I’m not sure about the other supplements that do. But of those that raise your HDL, I suspect niacin, inositol hexaniacinate, & the other B complex vitamins are quite possibly in this group.
People taking them tend to have their LDL cholesterol levels lowered & be less likely to develop heart disease as well as having their HDL levels increased.
2. In the same Medscape enewsletter that had the news about the new drug, there was an article that said your HDL is MUCH more protective if it carries lots of antioxidants.
So, whatever your HDL levels are, the more vegetables & fruits you eat that are high in antioxidants & the more natural vitamin C & vitamin E (tho only up to 200 iu daily to be safe) & other antioxidant supplements you take, the more protective your HDL level that you already have will be.
3. Recently I got an article in my email, also the Medscape eletter, with some interesting info on HDL:
"Patients with insulin resistance, especially those with the metabolic syndrome or type 2 diabetes mellitus, often present with an atherogenic lipid profile that is not dominated by hypercholesterolaemia, but rather by low levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) chol-esterol, elevated triglycerides and a lipoprotein sub-profile characterised by small, dense LDL.[5]
HDL cholesterol exerts a range of anti-atherosclerotic effects in the arterial wall,[6] and large observational studies conducted over several decades have established a low level of HDL cholesterol beyond doubt as an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease....
"This suggests several things to me if your HDL levels are low or proving hard to increase..
a. If you haven't yet had them checked, it might be worth checking your triglycerides, fasting glucose, & HBA1C.
If these faactors are too high, it can damage your health. They can be lowered without drugs. (Eating very little or no sugar or foods with refined grains & doing regular exercise, particularly strength training, help a lot. And, alpha lipoic acid & chromium polynicotinate & some other supplements also help.)
So making sure your triglycerides, fasting glucose, & HBA1C are low enough might boost your HDL; & would definitely be heart protective.
(I'm not sure about the danger level for triglycerides; but I think desirable is less than 100. Fasting glucose should definitely be lower than 100; & the HBA1C, a 60 to 90 moving average of your glucose based on red blood cells, should definitely be 5.9 or lower.)
b. This info also suggests that doing strength training with weights would boost your HDL due to the effect of such exercises on reducing insulin resistance. Plus, I think such exercise is most likely to boost HDL in other ways.
4. A friend who has been having trouble boosting his low HDL also said he recently had read that eating an unusually lowfat diet tended to produce low HDL levels also.
This is definitely the case. And, I’ve not covered it in these posts on boosting your HDL levels as yet.
Increasing your intake of “healthy” fats & oils can solve that problem for you & has many other benefits.
If you aren't allergic, eating nuts has all sorts of health benefits.
And eating a lot of vegetables & lean protein helps lower LDL's but can also lower HDL's if the fat content is too low.
Adding nuts adds all their numerous health benefits & tends to raise HDL or prevent it from falling. And, the sterols in nuts LOWER LDL's.
Also, you may have seen the headlines that eating vegetables helps prevent mental aging.
Upon closer reading, it seems that the people who ate lots of vegetables tended to eat salads & salad greens, which the researchers believe they ate with salad dressing. They theorize that helps deliver the antioxidants in the vegetables. In fact, salad greens were shown most effective in the study.
Extra virgin olive oil works best to deliver the antioxidants in vegetables & adds antioxidants of its own when used in cooking vegetables & in salad dressings. Extra virgin olive oil also is far safer to eat than the polyunsaturated oils like soy, corn, & safflower. Like them, extra virgin olive oil lowers LDL's when eaten instead of butter. Unlike them it boosts HDL's instead of lowering them.
(Oils like soy, corn, & safflower used to be popular with doctors as they lower LDL’s when used instead of butter. But they also LOWER your protective HDLs.)
Lastly, eating foods high in Omega 3’s like wild caught salmon, sardines, & oysters I found out recently, has many health benefits as does taking purified fish oil directly or in capsules as purified fish oil is high in omega 3 fatty acids also.
Most people in the United States eat too many of the less desirable oils like soy, corn, & safflower & get too much of the omega 6 fatty acids they contain & also get much too little omega 3 fatty acids.
So eating more foods with omega 3 fatty acids is an excellent way to boost your HDL levels & enjoy extra health benefits besides.
*********
We’ll post a bit of an overview of our posts on boosting HDL’s next time.
posted by David at 1:32 PM
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