What to Avoid on a Low-Cholesterol Diet
In today’s busy world, what is consumed and the consideration of how it affects the body is often sidelined. This is one of the main reasons for the increase in fast food or processed food consumption in recent years, and health ailments starting at a young age and without much warning. One of the major problems of such an unhealthy diet with high-cholesterol foods is a higher risk of heart attacks and heart diseases.
The food we eat has too much sugar, fats, and salt, which is beyond the necessary amount or the recommended intake for the body. This gives the need to avoid a diet with high-cholesterol foods and start swearing by a more balanced one. There is both good and bad cholesterol present in the body. LDL cholesterol refers to bad cholesterol, which increases in the case of high-cholesterol health issues, leading to a person facing a higher risk of heart ailments. When you stick to a balanced diet of vegetables, fruits, beans, whole grains, and any good fat foods, the blood pressure is stabilized, preventing clogging of the arteries. It also boosts immunity and overall health. While it is easy to find a list of foods that you should add to your diet, it is actually the high-cholesterol foods that you need to be aware of in order to keep them out.
Read the food labels carefully and eliminate the following:
1. Trans fats
These are the common fats that you find in various snacks and packaged foods like cookies, pastries, crackers, and even some types of margarine. You need to read the food labels in order to see whether any of these forms of fat are present. Other types of food culprits in this category include frozen pizza, doughnuts, microwave popcorn, biscuits, fried fast foods, cream-filled candies, and such.
2. Salt
When we say salt, we are not just talking about the salt you add while cooking but also salt present in other packaged food like bread or olives and canned tuna. It is there in frozen foods as well, and the recommended intake of salt for any given day is within 2,300 mg.
3. Sugar
This is another culprit similar to salt, and when we say sugar, we are not just talking about sugar as an ingredient but also the unhealthy alternatives from sweeteners to fructose. When you are trying to cut out sugar, you need to ensure that you avoid any food with a label that reads brown sugar, corn syrup, glucose, maltose, sucrose, lactose, high-fructose corn syrup, dextrose, and fruit juice concentrates. There could be sugars in fast food as well. When you are trying to stay away from a high-cholesterol diet, sugar is one of the ingredients that can easily sneak in through a soda or tomato ketchup, which is why reading the labels is crucial.