Reducing cholesterol?

I think statins are thought to be very very successful at reducing cholesterol.

I'm sure someone else will be able to advise better (Boop if she's still doing this stuff?) and I suspect your mum will be referred to a dietician, but I think the main issue is cutting down on saturated fats in the diet. You don't need to worry about dietary cholesterol (so eggs are fine, despite the advice you used to get to limit them!) but you should watch animal fats. YOu should also watch out for trans fats - often marked on packets as partially hydrogenated fats and typically found in processed foods - as they're really bad.

I've just had a health check at work (I work in a hospital) and I got the results today along with advice on how to reduce cholesterol. I can get it tomorrow at work and post tomorrow eve if you like. The only bit I remember was the word 'takeaways' ?

Basically WHS. Also eat more oliy fish and fibre. There's a good page on this from the BHF http://www.bhf.org.uk/keeping_your_heart_healthy/preventing_heart_disease/cholesterol.aspx

I don't think she'll necessarily get an automatic dietician referral 'just' for high cholesterol but if she's finding it too confusing she could ask her GP to refer her.

WEES.

I'm a dietitian, and don't necessarily see patients for cholesterol lowering advice, mainly as practice nurses are trained to give dietary advice for this.

Main things are avoid saturated fats (butter, lard, fatty meat, pies, pastry), include soluble fibre (oats, pulses, fruit and veg) as this helps lower cholesterol, and oily fish is good too.

Would advise against flora proactive/ benecol spread and similar products as you need to use a certain amount of the product each day to get the beneficial stuff (about 4tsps at least) and they are not a low fat product, and super expensive. So you are as well using a small amount of low fat/ olive oil spread.

I remember learning that dietary changes don't necessarily reduce the cholesterol a huge amount, but any reduction is good. And sometimes a diet can be (almost) faultless and cholesterol can still remain high due to other reasons (e.g. family history).

This might be useful as well as the BHF link:

http://www.eatwell.gov.uk/healthissues/healthyheart/cholesterol/

Edited for terrible typing and spelling

Thank you so much everyone, I really appreciate it. I'll pass those links on to my Mum so she can be a bit more prepared before her appointment with the nurse. It just goes to show the benefit that moving to a proactive GP surgery can have!

Doughnut, that's a lovely offer but you should keep hold of it in case, I'm sure the nurse will give her plenty of info next week.

That's really useful info about the spreads, she just uses normal flora atm and doesn't really have a lot so I guess carrying on with that is ok. Her diet isn't awful by any means, the only processed food she will eat will be sandwiches at lunch. We cook from scratch at home but perhaps need to think a little bit more about what we're cooking from scratch.

Hopefully then with the statins and a few diet modifications she can get the level back down.

Thanks all ?

My cholesterol came back slightly above the recommended level for diabetics, which is much lower than for the general population, and the consultant wanted me to start statins.

I don't know what it was that I did that reduced my cholesterol because I did a few things, but I have never eaten much in the way of saturated fat, being vegetarian, and I did not consciously reduce it. These are the things I did,:

reduced the amount of carbs in my diet.

lost a lot of weight (I was obese)

started taking regular exercise (I was doing very little: now I try to exercise every day)

started eating more soya protein and oats

drink one Benecol drink every morning (about 50p)

Next cholesterol reading was well within the recommended limits.

Since then I have lapsed a bit on the diet and put back some of the weight but am still doing everything else, and my cholesterol level has increased slightly, so I reckon reducing carbs and losing weight were the main things that made a difference.