What to Eat and Cook For Optimal Cholesterol Levels

How can one achieve and maintain an ideal weight but also ideal cholesterol levels? Being careful at what you eat and cook can most of the times be more important than you think. If you indeed want to accomplish these goals you must understand that is not about simply eliminating foods that you enjoy. Being careful at what you eat and cook is all about understanding what kind of foods are good for your health, which are not, which affect your health more and which affect it less and in what proportion.

First of all, you need to know that fruits and vegetables are cholesterol free foods. Besides this, you might as well need to know that dairy products, organ meats, and red meats are the perfect sources for cholesterol and saturated fat. Also, a lot of fat and cholesterol are contained in the skin of chicken and turkey. Dark meat will always have more fat than white meat. But not only meats - some vegetable products such as tropical oils (coconut and palm oils) have a very large amount of saturated fat in their composition. Vegetable shortenings, baked foods, snack foods, fried foods and margarine - all these foods contain a high amount of hydrogenated fats which are very bad for our health.

If a person indeed does want to eat meat, he or she should be eating mostly meat such as fish (which is high in omega 3 fatty acids) and white meat chicken or turkey, but always leaving out the skin.

When it comes to the importance of fish, recent studies have shown that people who eat at least two fish dishes per week have a smaller risk of developing a heart disease. Do not start obsessing about which fishes are best for your diet, which have a higher amount of fat or cholesterol because this way it is much more difficult for you to stick to and enjoy your diet. A decreased risk of heart disease will be seen in anybody that has a diet high in fish. Shellfish is okay to eat since it is low in fat even though it has some cholesterol. Of all the shellfish, shrimps have the highest cholesterol levels of them all.

When eating red meat, you should always be careful to eat lean cuts. For example, lean ham, small loin lamb chops, sirloin tip, flank steak, rump roast and veal chops are ok to eat. Still, you should avoid as much as possible the intake of frankfurters, bologna and bacon since these are very high in fat. The good news is that soon, low-fat varieties of these foods will become available.

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