How can I change my diet to help lower cholesterol?

Diet is a key factor in lowering high cholesterol; foods with cholesterol, trans fats and saturated fats should be avoided, while fiber is ideal. Watch family medicine physician Jennifer Caudle, DO, explain the dietary changes you should make.

Transcript

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Things you kind of want to minimize or avoid is the amount of cholesterol you're taking in, the amount of trans fats that you're taking in,

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as well as the amount of saturated fats. [MUSIC PLAYING]

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Diet can really affect your cholesterol levels. Diet is such an important piece to this puzzle in terms of treating your cholesterol

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and helping keep it low. Remember, that you want to limit the amount of cholesterol that you take in your diet.

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This is things like-- and you want to read the labels too. This is something actually that's very important. When you go to the grocery store and you're going down

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the aisles, you're picking up different foods, look to see how much cholesterol is in them. Things you kind of want to minimize or avoid

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is the amount of cholesterol you're taking in, the amount of trans fats that you're taking in, as well as the amount of saturated fats.

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These are three things to look for on labels to keep low. And remember, foods like French fries, hydrogenated oils,

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margarine, butter, things like this can have these types of fatty products in them. So keep this in mind as you're going through the grocery

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store. Some things that can help your cholesterol include making sure that you have plenty of fiber in your diet. And if you're wondering what foods have fiber in it,

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just think about breakfast, for example. Oat bran, oatmeal are some great breakfast foods with fiber in them. And don't forget proper fruits and vegetables,

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which also have lots of fiber. So these are some foods that can actually really help your cholesterol in the long run.