Two kinds of Cholesterol: HDL and LDL
LDL delivers cholesterol from your liver to your cells, HDL swings through the system and picks up the loose cholesterol and picks up some of the excess LDL crap hanging on here and there.
Do you know what your exact scores are for HDLs and LDLs? Saying you have high cholesterol in and of itself doesn't mean shit really. You're supposed to have a lot less HDL than LDL, but depending on the ratio and levels, it may not be all that bad. Careful with that Lipitor shit. It'll jack up your liver and kidneys with prolonged use. The biggest things you can do to limit cholesterol production in your body (70% is produced by your body, only 30% is direct food intake) is to watch your triglyceride (especially refined sugars, fats, carbs) and specifically..
saturated fat intake.. and ESPECIALLY the bullshit fake-fat. Meaning.. for the love of God, don't eat anything that has hydrogenated ingredients. Don't eat anything that has sorbitol ester of fatty acids or other similarly worded emulsifiers. If you can believe it... This crap is also used in some other products/applications you might have heard of: Roid Cream, Pesticides, and engine lubricant.
With the recent publicized bad-press about trans fats and hydrogenated oils (they came very close to being federally banned a couple years back), food manufacturers are chemically engineering new pseudo-fats that don't fall underneath the required truth in packaging laws. The reason they use these pseudo fats is because they aren't food.. so bacteria doesn't eat it and it will stay on the shelves a lot longer.. which means more money. However, if the bacteria won't eat it (and they'll eat nearly anything), then the odds are that you and I shouldn't be eating it either, ya dig?
One of my favorite examples of this bullshit labelling was a tub of "fat free" Cool Whip I saw on the shelf a few weeks back. Curious as to how they'd pull that off, I checked the ingredient list to find that not only was the term "fat free" a complete lie, hydrogenated oil was the second or third highest ingredient (up from about 6th or 7th in "regular" Cool Whip).. and as we know.. oil is 100% fat. Amazing how they can legally get away with flat out lying about shit like this. So, not only is it NOT fat free.. it's rediculously WORSE for you than the "regular" Cool Whip. Crazy, man. Just crazy.
Anyhow. With some modification to the ingredients you use in the food you eat you'd be suprised what you can fix. The body is amazingly good at repairing itself if you give it the right tools for the job. When I moved in with family to go back to school here recently, my mother in law was a size 22, my father in law had cholesterol score total up around 260-275 and blood pressure bordering on hypertension. They told him to go on lipitor and blood pressure medication if he couldn't get a handle on it immediately.. it's a bit of a long story, but I've been forced to learn in detail about body function and human nutrition over the past few years.. so I told him to just try eating differently. I call it the french toast and fried potatoes 'diet'. Today, about a year later, my mother in law is wearing a size 10-12 and has dropped about 50-60 lbs, my father in law's cholesterol is down to 155, his BP is down to normal and he's lost about 40lbs as well. No extra exercise or medication, just a change with ingredients/products purchased. We really do eat pancakes, french toast, eggs, potatoes, pasta.. all of it. The main differences are that we don't buy anything with hydrogenated oils, with cow/pork products, NO artificial sweeteners (they make you FAT!) .. and we limit refined sugars and carbonation but not totally eliminated. There is no deprivation or starvation going on.. just not eating any poison.
Well, that was probably more than you wanted to hear.. but there you have it anyway.
Best,
~T.