We use proven natural cholesterol lowering methods in our Fort Collins, Colorado clinic. Despite what you hear, you can lower cholesterol naturally with natural cholesterol remedies.
Why use a natural cholesterol lowering treatment?
Statin prescription drugs are often poorly tolerated. Some of their side effects include fatigue, muscle pain, sexual dysfunction and liver and nerve damage in about 10-15% of people who take them. Yuck.
Statins don’t change the size and density of cholesterol molecules. Small, dense cholesterol particles cause heart disease and plaque in the arteries, while large, fluffy particles do not. This is an emerging area of cholesterol science that we address.
While statins are advertised as the end-all, be-all to preventing heart disease, nothing is further from the truth. There is so much more to preventing heart disease and natural cholesterol lowering than just cholesterol alone.
Many people are convinced that cholesterol is bad, nasty stuff that causes heart disease; and they’ve been trained to think that if they don’t eat cholesterol rich foods and keep their cholesterol levels low, they will be safe.
Perhaps more important than lowering cholesterol is dealing with inflammation. A high inflammatory state, combined with elevated LDL cholesterol will indeed set a person up for heart disease. Targeting inflammation is an important, yet often neglected aspect of heart disease prevention.
There’s More To Heart Disease Than Cholesterol
Cholesterol is only one factor among many, and newer findings are showing that it isn’t the most important.
Cholesterol is actually a repair molecule produced by the body when inflammation is high. You can think of inflammation as ‘biological rusting’ – it wears away at our body over time. And like rusting, it can be prevented with proper care.
Cholesterol does a lot of useful things in our body. It is vital to our existence; it helps build hormones, the lining of our nerves, and even the outside of every cell.
While lowering cholesterol naturally and getting the different types of cholesterol in balance (higher HDL, lower LDL and Triglyerides), what else do we need to do to prevent heart disease that just lower cholesterol naturally?
As mentioned earlier, addressing inflammation is the key. Inflammation occurs when we eat too much sugar, don’t exercise enough, and have too much stress, food allergies, and exposure to toxins, to name a few.
Sugar, for instance, creates those small, dense cholesterol particles. It’s not fat in our diets that cause high cholesterol (or obesity, for that matter). Sugar, most often in the form of refined carbohydrates (any kind of white flour food – crackers, cookies, bagels, pasta, etc) will raise triglyerides, lower HDL (good) cholesterol, and cause pre-diabetes.
If you have high cholesterol, all of these things need to be addressed. Simply taking a pill, or using natural cholesterol lowering, is only part of the therapy.
Natural Cholesterol Lowering
In our Fort Collins clinic, we lower cholesterol naturally (and prevent heart disease) by doing several things:
1. Comprehensive blood work.
Just looking at total cholesterol, LDL, HDL and triglycerides doesn’t give us the full story. We use a much more comprehensive blood test that looks at the size and shape of your cholesterol molecules. This way, we can monitor therapy with time.
Measure inflammation. There are several blood tests that reveal your body’s overall level of inflammation.
Hemoglobin A1c. This test tells us how high your blood sugar has been over the last several months. Keeping blood sugar low is key to preventing heart– and many other – diseases.
Fibrinogen. This is a protein that tells us how easily your blood will clot. It should be relatively low.
Insulin. Insulin is a hormone that pulls sugar into the cells to be used by the body. If it’s high, this signifies a danger of not only heart disease but also diabetes (which in turn leads to heart disease). Insulin goes up before blood sugar does, and many doctors only look at blood sugar, not insulin. This is backwards because by the time blood sugar goes up; insulin has been high for a while and creates inflammation.
2. We lower cholesterol naturally using a proven combination of natural medicines, as well as others that help support this process.
3. Provide you with nutritional information that will help you raise your good HDL, lower the bad LDL and triglyerides, and lower your inflammation.
4. Diet and lifestyle counseling. No, we aren’t going to put you on a starvation diet or tell you that you have to become a vegetarian (not that there is anything wrong with that!) You will gain an education about food, inflammation and cholesterol that few doctors and even fewer nutritionists or dieticians understand.
We suggest you use all of the above if you have a need for natural cholesterol lowering. If you are interested in lowering cholesterol naturally, and truly preventing heart disease, rather than just taking a pill, come see us in our Fort Collins clinic. Our natural cholesterol lowering techniques are safe, and they work.