Lowering high cholesterol

The best way to stop high cholesterol is to lose weight, get more active, cut down on alcohol and stop smoking. Find out why this works.

If you are overweight, you can make big improvements to your health including improving your cholesterol levels. 

Losing weight will tend to reduce your “bad” cholesterol (low-density lipoprotein, or LDL) and triglycerides (another form of “bad” fat in the blood).

Eat the right kind of fats

Avoid or cut down on foods known to be high in saturated fats

• cakes and biscuits
• pastries and pies
• sausages and bacon
• other fatty meats (remove fat)
• chocolate (milk and white)
• palm oil

Try to eat more mono-unsaturated fats, which have been shown to increase levels of "good cholesterol" (high-density lipoprotein, or HDL) and reduce any blockages in your arteries.

Foods high in unsaturated fat include:

• avocados
• oily fish like mackerel, salmon and herrings
• nuts and seeds
• olive oil, and cold pressed rapeseed oil

Your diet should also include lots of green vegetables, nuts, seeds and berries. Read more about healthy eating.

Smoking leads to high cholesterol

Smoking:

• reduces the “good cholesterol”, or HDL, which usually takes cholesterol away from the blood vessels to be broken down
• makes the “bad cholesterol”, or LDL, more likely to attach to the walls of your blood vessels causing narrowing
• damages the walls of your blood vessels making it more likely that cholesterol will stick and clog up the blood vessels

If you smoke, try stopping?

Get active: move more

Being active increases the levels of good cholesterol or HDL in your body which moves fatty deposits to the liver, so they can be broken down.

Being overweight can increase the amount of "bad cholesterol" in your blood, so a little more moving could help you to lose weight, which could cut your cholesterol. Plus regular physical activity can help lower blood pressure, by keeping your heart and blood vessels healthy.  Find some new ways to move more for free.

Making lifestyle changes to reduce your CVD risk

You can make a difference to your cholesterol by making lifestyle changes.

1. Losing weight, a 5% reduction in weight, will have a significant impact on increasing your HDL levels. Do this by cutting your carbohydrate intake (especially bread, rice, pasta and potatoes).
2. Change your diet as eating plenty of green vegetables and berries, oily fish, poultry, seeds and nuts will improve your cholesterol. Monounsaturated fats, like olive oil, reduce LDL. Omega-3 fats found in oily fish such as salmon and mackerel as well as walnuts and flax seeds boost HDL level.
3. Cut out trans fats because they raise overall cholesterol levels. Trans fats, sometimes listed on food labels as "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil," are often used in margarines and biscuits, crackers and cakes.
4. Increase your fibre intake as this reduces the absorption of cholesterol into your bloodstream. Soluble fibre is found in foods such as kidney beans, brussels sprouts, oatmeal, apples and pears. However, oatmeal, apples and pears also contain carbohydrates, so avoid eating too much of these, and avoid drinking apple juice.
5. Increase activities like brisk walking, which boost HDL levels. Aerobic exercise (the kind that really increases your heart rate and gets you sweating) seems to have the added bonus of encouraging HDL to work better and reducing CVD risk, even if the HDL levels don't go up much.
6. Quit smoking because smokers have lower HDL levels than non-smokers. Levels bounce back up once people quit.
7. Cut back on alcohol despite the fact that alcohol increases HDL, as alcohol increases triglycerides and blood pressure. Alcoholic drinks often also contain a lot of calories. The bad effects of high alcohol intake swamp any benefit from a higher HDL.

For information on the treatment of high cholesterol, see this page.