How to boost your protective HDL levels....

Today's Post:  Monday, 8-6-2012

The kind of HDL that indicates heart protection tends to cause or be caused by low levels of small particle LDL. 

And, if the HDL is not oxidized and increased by things with other health benefits, it is most protective.

(I raised my HDL from the mid fifty range to the 89 to 96 range using the methods here.)

1.  One of the most powerful ways to increase HDL is to avoid the things that lower it or cause an increase of the harmful small particle LDL. 

(Harvard researchers found that the lower the level of small particle LDL, the lower the level of triglycerides and the higher the level of HDL.)

2.  So the second thing to do is to increase the things that lower small particle LDL directly.

3.  The third thing to do is to do things that increase HDL that are safe and have other health benefits.

1.  STOP and avoid things that lower your HDL as completely as you can.

a) As we posted about last week, it takes work today to avoid eating trans fats and hydrogenated oils.

But it’s very important to do so.  The big recent news is that if you eat trans fats regularly they build up to very harmful levels.  They increase the level of the harmful small particle LDL in your blood directly. And, the resulting level of HDL will go down.

b) Tobacco smoke both direct smoking and second hand smoke not only lower HDL, they make what is left over less protective.  This directly results in the build up of plaque on the insides of your blood vessels.

To the maximum extent you can arrange it, avoid breathing tobacco smoke.  Breathing it is a direct cause of heart disease and will show a drop in your HDL that understates the harm it does.

c)  Don’t eat high fructose corn syrup or foods containing it.  To do so, like trans fats, you have to avoid foods likely to contain it and always read labels.  Avoid eating real sugar more than a few times a week and a few times a month is better.  Eat close to zero foods containing refined grain.  And eat low moderate amounts of even 100 % whole grain foods.

And, drink zero soft drinks both regular and diet.

Each of those foods and drinks tend to be fattening and cause excessive blood sugar swings.  That increases heart disease and overall disease risk for other reasons.

AND, they also lower your HDL and boost the dickens out of your triglyceride levels.  Without eating that stuff almost always, your triglycerides will be below 100. By ingesting a lot your triglycerides will be over 200 – maybe over 300 in bad cases.

Your HDL will also go down and your small particle LDL will go up. Your HDL will be much higher if you rarely eat this stuff!

Since many of the foods that have trans fats also contain refined grains and excessive sugars of some kind.  Avoiding those foods for either reason will increase your HDL and protect your heart.

(This also has some interesting effects.  At a fast food place, the bun may be worse for your heart than the hamburger!)

2. Besides upgrading your diet in these ways, there is a major way to boost your HDL by directly decreasing the level of small particle LDL in your blood.

Regular vigorous exercise most days of every week does exactly that researchers have found.

Strength training and interval cardio both do this.  As long as you do one of these most days of every week and do some of each every week, the minutes of the most intense exercise can be just a few minutes and get the effect.

To some degree more is better.  But is does NOT have to be hours and hours.  20 or 30 minutes a day is better than 10 if you can fit it in. But it does NOT have to take more than 30 minutes or so.

Moderate exercise is different.  If you can get a few hours a day of walking or some other much less intense exercise too, it will help.  It will help with fat loss and over all health protection.  (It’s because hardly anyone has time for that today that I’m so interested in at-your-desk exercisers.)

I do the regular vigorous exercise for strength training and/or interval cardio from 6 to 45 minutes once every day each week.  25 to 30 minutes in the morning is most typical.

This has been proved to increase HDL and heart protection.

3.  There are a number of foods and supplements that boost HDL and have other beneficial health effects.

a) The most helpful is the B vitamin niacin.  I take 300 mg twice a day once after breakfast and once after lunch.

This mostly avoids the flushing effect which is like a mild instant sunburn in sensation that goes away after an hour or two.  Larger doses on an empty stomach are more problematic.

People who take extra niacin have been found to die less often of any cause than people who do not. 

The reason for this is that taking niacin measures as if it lowers small particle LDL directly.  That means it prevents heart disease and helps prevent other diseases caused by impaired circulation.  Taking niacin measures as increasing HDL AND lowering triglycerides.  The research at Harvard found this means that taking niacin almost certainly lowers the amount of small particle LDL directly. 

So, you might predict niacin would lower overall LDL a bit too to reflect that.  Taking niacin DOES lower LDL too.  Taking niacin is most protective because it apparently lowers the most harmful kind of LDL not just all of it.

b)  I also take 300 mg a day of inositol hexaniacinate twice a day before breakfast and after dinner.   This molecule has 6 niacin parts and one inositol core.  Apparently as you digest it the niacin is removed slowly over time.  I finally found a reference which suggests that this 600 mg total gives me the effect of 500 mg of niacin a day but so slowly as to produce no flush.  And in fact it is often labeled as No Flush Niacin. 

c)  I also take 200 mcg a day of chromium polynicotinate.  That only has 2 mg of niacin.  But added to my other 1100 mg a day it may help.  The chromium also prevents blood sugar surges if I eat something sugar or grainy which is heart protective.  But Dr Julian Whitaker also reports that the people taking chromium that he treats lower their LDL and increase their HDL cholesterol.  So taking this supplement looks to boost my HDL more than just the 2 mg of niacin would suggest.  It definitely protects my heart by its help in normalizing my blood sugar levels.

d)  People who eat berries tend to have their HDL go up.  In addition, the micronutrients in berries are very high in antioxidants and other health benefits.  This means that eating berries both increases your HDL and keeps it protective by stopping it from being oxidized too!

Eating berry supplements also helps protein and vitamin C keep your blood vessel walls strong.  So doing so helps prevent heart disease an extra way and protects you from strokes too.

I take bilberry supplements each day from Nature’s Way for their vision and blood vessel protection.  They added elderberries so I now take 3 a day to ensure I get enough of the bilberry each day.  But that may well have boosted my HDL 5 points or more too!

I also found that people who began eating organic blueberries got such a brain boost it was like they were 12 years younger on the tests.  So I now eat two 10 ounce packages of wild organic frozen blueberries each week that I buy at Whole Foods.

I began that for the brain benefits.  But that too may have boosted my HDL another 5 points or more.

e)  Some people are severely allergic to tree nuts. But people who can eat nuts and eat a few daily get an increase in HDL.  The people who eat raw nuts or dry roasted nuts get the health OK monosaturated oils and some other health beneficial oils.  (The oiled and salted kind have excess salt and the oils are usually bad for you omega 6 oils.  So avoid those!)

But there’s more.  People who can eat nuts safely and do so several days a week get so many health benefits besides higher HDL, they tend to live several healthy years longer than people who don’t.

I eat walnut halves and pecan halves for lunch every weekday and some Saturdays.

This too helps boost my HDL.

f)  Drink one or a bit more of alcoholic drinks most days each week.  And, most of those times drink red wine.

(Some people drink more than two a day or more than three a day if they drink at all.  Those people should not use this one.)

But for people who can mostly stick with one glass of red wine with dinner, doing so does boost your HDL. And, red wine also has resveratrol and saponins and other heart protecting ingredients besides the alcohol. 

More than 1 drink a day boosts your HDL a bit more but begins to have life threatening increases in your accident risk and to produce other problems.  In men at least, more than one a day tends to add fat to your belly too.  Part of my fat loss was due to my cutting my intake of red wine from 12 a week to more like 7 or 8 a week.

g) Taking choline and eating foods high in it also boosts HDL cholesterol.  I take lecithin capsules and B Complex tablets that have some extra choline – a total of about 260 mg a day.  And I eat some wheat germ every other day and two whole eggs including yolks every other day.  (I recently was able to start to get eggs at Whole Foods that were pasture raised instead of grain fed.  So I now get less of the harmful omega 6 from the egg yolks than I once did.)

The other benefit of this is that extra choline has a brain boosting effect because it gives your body the building block to make the neurotransmitter, acetyl choline.

These things have certainly worked for me.   When I just did some cardio, my HDL tended to be in the mid fifties.  When I added all these other actions, it has measured between 89 and 96.