Lowering Cholesterol One Small Step at a Time
The heart-friendly diets I have written about are probably considered drastic. This is because they are the ‘ideal’ – they are extremely healthy and quite natural. Many people today are in a rush and might not have the time to stop and eat a heart-healthy diet – all the time. So the next best thing is to take a small step towards eating that ideal diet.
What I’m saying is if you drink two or three cans of soda pop a day – cut back by one. This will introduce less sugar and/or caffeine into your system. In a week or two cut back another soda pop. Take fruit juices to work with you and start drinking them in place of soda pop. In this way you will gradually make the change to a heart-healthy diet.
I’ve pointed out that eating nuts or a piece of fruit in place of that donut or other sugary snack at work. That is fine. But if you still find yourself hungry between meals – how about a complex carbohydrate like bread? A piece of stone-crushed, whole wheat (or some other grain) bread is full of the nutrients your body and heart need. And it takes a while for your body to metabolize the complex carbohydrates in the bread – this keeps the hunger pangs away for much longer than eating a sugary piece of pastry. When you eat that pastry, your blood sugar spikes and the pancreas has to release a slug of insulin to help process that sugar. Soon that sugar is gone and hunger pangs restart. Complex carbohydrates take longer to process and keep hunger away longer.
Note: About a hundred years ago, steel rollers came into use to crush wheat for flour. This made it easier for bakers, but was worse for us. White flour is very low in nutrients. In a way, I think, we’ve been indoctrinated to think that white flour is the very best for us when in fact it is not. There are breads sold in super markets that are made from stone-crushed, whole-heat flour. The keywords are ’stone-crushed’. Stone crushing crushes the husk of the wheat (or other grain) which remains mixed in with the flour – the husk has a lot of great nutrients which are very heart-friendly.
