Dread-Head's Blog

No........you can eat all the right things and do all the right things but if you are pre-disposed to high cholesteral it won't help very much. Like it or not, you are heading to the drug store for a statin drug such as Lipitor.
My dad did the same thing you did and he was stunned that his numbers were so high in spite of his healthy regiment, so he went on Lipitor and it literally cut his number in half in 30 days!!!

hi dread... like lanny said, if high cholesteral runs in your family it's no surprise you have it too. but if the doc said it was "ridiculously" high, some docs would have recommended medications. perhaps he wants to see if you can fix the problem yourself, unless you told him what you told us. second opinion? maybe... but continue to take care of yourself!

I had high cholesterol in 7/06 and have since stopped eating red meat. I take 2400 mg of fish oil caps daily and also have lowered my sodium intake. My cholesterol went from 283 to 204. Cinnamon also lowers cholesterol and you can buy capsules, if you don't like it as a spice. You're not doomed! Exercising is also a good way to lower it and since you already don't eat that much red meat, you should be okay. Statins have several side effects and just from reading your blogs, I think they would interfere with your lifestyle: muscle weakness, fatigue, blurred vision, to name a few. Hang in there and keep us posted!

There are better choices that just going straight for the drugs pharmaceutical companies put out.

Also, you should go to this site and read about the statin drugs. It is predicted that 50% of Americans will be on statin-type drugs when they don't need to be. Alternative medicine doctors believe that 5% of people whose cholesterol is over 350 because of an inherited problem are all that may really benefit. Remember that taking something like Lipitor will have other consequences within your body. I strongly urge you to try other things before buying into the hype. Lanny's father had great successful, but his doctor probably didn't tell him that statin drugs cause deficiencies in other areas and people on these should be typing CoQ10 enzyme supplements.

http://www.mercola.com/2001/may/26/cholesterol_guidelin
es.htm

Also this site:
http://www.drweil.com/drw/ecs/index.html

And in either, you can just type cholesterol and do a search on the site and read about alternatives you can try.

Also, taking fish oil on a regular basis is a good thing. But you can't trust what is sold in our stores because there is no regulation. I was at a conference by Dr. Les Simpson, formerly of the WHO, who said he tested 10 evening primose oil products off the shelf and only 2 of them had what it said it had in the bottle. Here are links to two sites that sell quality fish oil products (I have no stake in these companies and don't get residuals for referrals either):

http://www.nordicnaturals.com/

http://www.efamol.com/fset.asp?pid=1

The Nordic Naturals products are

Dread-Head

Things you can do to lower your cholesterol:

Add cold press flak seed oil to your daily diet. It's a liquid in bottle that's available at Whole Foods. Put a spoonful of the oil once a day in any food you eat. It will help lower your bad cholesterol reading by 5-10 percent.

Limit your daily intake of food items with cholesterol.

Engage in intensive aerobic workouts 5 times a week, with each workout lasting an hour.