Americans are no strangers to cholesterol issues — about 86 million adults and 7% of kids and adolescents in the United States have worrisome cholesterol levels. And these cholesterol imbalances can set the stage for serious heart disease, including heart attack and coronary artery disease.
When it comes to improving cholesterol numbers, we often talk in terms of lowering them, but that isn’t always the case. In fact, one of the best ways to improve your cholesterol levels is to boost a certain kind of cholesterol, high-density lipoproteins (HDLs), aka the good cholesterol.
At Bethel Family Medicine, our team of experienced health providers, under the direction of Dr. Douglas R. Grogan and Dr. Jennifer Hall Difalco, makes it a priority to help our patients better manage cholesterol levels. With that in mind, we want to review four great strategies for boosting your HDL counts.
(Please note that we measure cholesterol in milligrams per deciliter, or mg/dL, but we’re going to just list the numbers for simplicity’s sake.)
Before we get into best practices for raising the levels of HDLs in your body, let’s briefly review cholesterol in general.
Cholesterol is a waxy substance that helps your body build cells and produce hormones and vitamins. You have two types of cholesterol: low-density lipoproteins (LDLs) and HDLs. The role of your HDLs is to clear out excess LDLs from your bloodstream so they don’t build up and create blockages in your blood vessels in the form of plaques.
The reason why it’s important to focus on keeping your HDL levels up — we want to see 40 and higher for men and 50 and higher for women — is because we’re introducing too many LDLs from outside sources.
The reality is that your liver produces all the cholesterol you need, but we add more through our diet in the form of trans and saturated fats, as well as animal meats. And your HDLs can’t keep up with the influx of cholesterol.
To get your cholesterol levels into a heart-healthy range, we’re going to focus on boosting your HDL numbers, which you can accomplish by:
One key way to raise your HDL numbers is to move your diet away from dangerous fats, including trans fats and saturated fats. This means ditching processed and junk foods that are long on calories and short on nutrition. Instead, focus on a diet that favors:
This dietary change will not only increase your HDLs but also lower your LDLs, making it a win-win.
Another piece to the HDL puzzle is exercise, which boosts the levels of HDL in your body and makes them more effective. A great place to start is to make sure that you exercise for at least 30 minutes a day, though more is better.
Carrying excess fat can wreak havoc on cholesterol numbers. People who are overweight or have obesity often have high LDL numbers, which means their HDL numbers need to be higher to keep up. So, by losing weight, you lower your LDL numbers, and the ratio between LDL and HDL improves.
Alcohol consumption has been tied to lower HDL numbers, so we recommend that you limit how much you drink.
Smoking or vaping is a fast track to lower HDL numbers, among many other health issues, so this is another reason to quit.
The best way to figure out how to best increase your HDL numbers is to sit down with us so that we can review your lifestyle and your health to come up with an individualized plan. This plan might include weight loss, nutritional counseling, and more.
To get that ball rolling, we invite you to schedule an appointment at our office in Brockton, Massachusetts, today.
