Your health: Four ways to eat to lower cholesterol

Four ways to eat to lower cholesterol

The Harvard Medical School offers four steps for using your diet to lower your cholesterol:

1. Stick with unsaturated fats and avoid saturated and trans fats. Most vegetable fats (oils) are made up of unsaturated fats that are healthy for your heart. Foods that contain healthy fats include oily fish, nuts, seeds, and some vegetables. At the same time, limit your intake of foods high in saturated fat, which is found in many meat and dairy products, and stay away from trans fats. These include any foods made with "partially hydrogenated vegetable oils."

2. Get more soluble fiber. Eat more soluble fiber, such as that found in oatmeal and fruits. This type of fiber can lower blood cholesterol levels when eaten as part of a healthy-fat diet.

3. Include plant sterols and stanols in your diet. These naturally occurring plant compounds are similar in structure to cholesterol. When you eat them, they help limit the amount of cholesterol your body can absorb. Plant sterols and stanols are found in an increasing number of food products such as spreads, juices, and yogurts.

4. Find a diet that works for you. When a friend or relative tells you how much his or her cholesterol level dropped after trying a particular diet, you may be tempted to try it yourself. If you do, and after a few months you discover that you're not getting the same benefits, you may need to chalk it up to genetic and physiological differences. There is no one-size-fits-all diet for cholesterol control. You may need to try several approaches to find one that works for you.

Although diet can be a simple and powerful way to improve cholesterol levels, it plays a bigger role for some people than for others. Don't be discouraged if you have followed a diet but not reached your goal blood level. Keep it up.

Even if you do end up needing medication to keep your cholesterol in check, you likely will need less than if you didn't make any dietary changes.

Caffeine may protect women from dementia

Good news, coffee lovers. A new study has uncovered a significant link between caffeine consumption in older women and a reduced risk of dementia, the Huffington Post reports.

Although researchers have yet to establish a "cause and effect" between the two, they did find a strong relationship between higher caffeine consumption in women 65 and older and a lower risk of developing dementia or cognitive impairment.

Specifically, those women who self-reported drinking more than 261 milligrams of caffeine per day, or about two to three eight-ounce cups of coffee or five to six eight-ounce cups of black tea, enjoyed a 36 percent decline in their risk of getting dementia during a 10 year follow-up period.

"While we can't make a direct link between higher caffeine consumption and lower incidence of cognitive impairment and dementia, with further study we can better quantify its relationship with cognitive-health outcomes," Ira Driscoll, the study's lead author and a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

"The mounting evidence of caffeine consumption as a potentially protective factor against cognitive impairment is exciting given that caffeine is also an easily modifiable dietary factor," Driscoll said.