JustCare

Tag: Cholesterol

  • What’s your cholesterol level?

    What’s your cholesterol level?

    More than 25 percent (86 million) of Americans have high cholesterol. Another 33 percent (120 million) do not know their cholesterol level. But, if you want to reduce your risk of plaque in your arteries and heart disease, as well as protect your health overall, you want your cholesterol levels under control, writes Knvul Sheikh for the New York Times.

    What is cholesterol? Cholesterol is a waxy “lipid,” or fat that your liver produces for good health. Among other things, it creates cell membranes and hormones. But, if the amount of cholesterol is not right, it can cause health problems.

    Can you have good cholesterol or is it all bad? You have two types of cholesterol, “good” cholesterol and “bad” cholesterol. If your LDL or “bad” cholesterol is high, it can cause health problems. If your HDL is high, it can reduce your risk of health problems.

    What causes high LDL cholesterol levels? If you eat too much meat and dairy products, you can create too much cholesterol. Your genes can also contribute to high LDL cholesterol levels.

    What’s the danger of high cholesterol levels? Too much cholesterol can cause heart attacks and stroke. And, you might not know you are at risk because you are not likely to have symptoms.

    When should you check your cholesterol levels? By the time you have Medicare, you should have regular cholesterol checks. But, as early as your 20’s, it’s good to check your cholesterol levels every several years. And, if you have a family history of heart attacks and stroke, you might want to get more frequent checks. Talk to your doctor.

    Your cholesterol levels will likely rise as you get older. For women, they rise after menopause.

    What should you be tracking? Track your LDL, which is the “bad” cholesterol. It should not go above 100 mg/dL and should be as low as possible.  If you have diabetes, you should keep it below 70. Your HDL, the “good” cholesterol, brings the cholesterol you don’t need back to your liver from your arteries, so you can discharge it. You want your HDL to be greater than 40 mg/dL and ideally above 60.

    How can you lower your LDL cholesterol level? Exercise more, eat healthy and avoid alcohol. Eat more whole grains, vegetables, fruits, seeds and legumes–“soluble fibers.” Eating avocados, nuts and fatty fish can also help. Don’t eat butter, cheese and red meat or ultraprocessed foods.

    Should you take drugs to lower your cholesterol? Sometimes. Especially if you’ve had a heart attack or a stroke or your LDL is high or your arteries are severely blocked.

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  • Eating food high in fiber delivers many benefits

    Eating food high in fiber delivers many benefits

    Carbohydrates are your primary source of energy. And, many complex carbohydrates provide fiber. Eating food high in fiber delivers a variety of health benefits, especially for older people. A study in Journals of Gerontology reports that, of all food categories, fiber makes the biggest difference to “successful aging.”

    The study found that older adults who eat fiber-rich diets are far more likely to avoid disability and disease as they age as well as to live longer. They are also less likely to have symptoms of depression, cognitive impairments, diabetes, high blood pressure, breathing problems and chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease and stroke. But, the authors caution that the study results are not strong enough to be a source of dietary advice. They also make clear that the 1,600 study participants did not consume a lot of sugary drinks, which can be harmful to health.

    The National Institutes of Health reports that fiber can prevent stomach and intestinal problems, including constipation. Fiber is important for a heart healthy diet. And, there is substantial evidence that fiber can lower your cholesterol and blood sugar levels.

    Fiber can also help you maintain a healthy weight. Eating foods with fiber fills you up faster than eating other foods, keeping you from over-eating.

    Fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans and whole grains all provide you with fiber. To increase your supply of fiber, eat whole fruits and vegetables and leave the skins on. Whole fruits and vegetables have far higher fiber content than fruit and vegetable juice. Raspberries, artichokes, green peas, lentils, barley, pears and split peas are particularly rich in fiber. The Mayo Clinic advises that to maximize the benefits of fiber, drink a good amount of water. (Processed foods are lower in fiber than whole foods.)

    Keep in mind that if you want to increase the amount of fiber in your diet, you should do it slowly–over a period of a few weeks–so that the bacteria in your digestive system adapt to this diet change. Otherwise, you may end up with intestinal gas, stomach bloating and cramping.

    [This article was originally published on August 15, 2018]

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  • Eating avocados offers so many health benefits

    Eating avocados offers so many health benefits

    If you’re looking to switch up your diet to eat healthy and want to continue to enjoy the foods you eat, consider eating lots of avocados. Some experts call avocados a superfood because they offer so many health benefits. And, they are so delish! What more can you ask for?

    The benefits of eating an avocado a day appear to have no bounds. Eating avocados provides you with more than 20 essential vitamins and minerals, including vitamins B6, C, E and K. Avocados also are a great source of folate, potassium, magnesium, niacin and riboflavin.

    There’s more. Avocados can be good for your eyes, providing you with beta carotene and lutein. These nutrients, in turn, have been shown to reduce people’s risk of macular degeneration and vision loss.

    Avocados also give you omega-3 fatty acids, which have been found to reduce heart disease and stroke, and lots of monounsaturated fats, which are good for your heart. Avocados can lower people’s blood pressure and bad cholesterol, LDL They can also boost people’s good cholesterol, HDL

    Avocados could help you lose weight, even though a single avocado has around 227 calories. The healthy fat in avocados keeps you feeling full much longer than other far less nutritious and equally caloric foods. Moreover, avocados’ fat and antioxidants reduce inflammation and help with weight management. One study found that women who ate one Hass avocado a day had less belly fat than women who ate the same number of calories but no avocado.

    Avocados could do wonders for your skin. A UCLA study found that people who ate one avocado a day had improved skin elasticity and firmness.

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  • Eating different snacks could lower your cholesterol

    Eating different snacks could lower your cholesterol

    MedPage Today reports on a new study, reported in the Journal of Nutrition, revealing that people who ate certain snacks instead of other snacks, including junk food, saw their cholesterol levels fall, even though they did not change anything else they ate.

    The theory behind the experiment is that food is a type of medicine.  The right food can lower your LDL cholesterol and possibly your risk of death. In this experiment, the snack food was a substitute for a statin.

    The patients in the experiment were not on statins. They could not take them or they did not want to take them. They had no chronic conditions and did not smoke.

    The snack substitution worked well, with almost everyone adhering to their new diet. That is not always the case! A lot of people are hard-pressed to give up junk food and other snacks that are unhealthy.

    So what are foods with cholesterol-lowering ingredients? They are pretty yummy, as it turn out: Oatmeal, smoothies, granola, chocolate bars. These foods replaced snack bars, oreos, goldfish, potato chips and other junk foods, they would have eaten.

    To keep your cholesterol down, you can also eat hummus and whole grain foods, including crackers with cucumbers, carrots, or celery.  These foods are cholesterol free. They also provide soluble fiber, one way to lower cholesterol. In the vegetable category, eggplant, okra, beans are great. In the fruit category, apples, grapes, strawberries and citrus fruits are good.

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  • Merck charged with blocking generic competition

    Merck charged with blocking generic competition

    Paige Minemeyer reports for FierceHealthcare on a lawsuit filed by two insurers against Merck for using its power to block generic competition to its cholesterol drugs, Zetia and Vytorin. A third insurer filed a separate lawsuit alleging the same. Until Congress steps in to negotiate drug prices, pharmaceutical companies will game the system every which way they can to protect and increase their profits.

    What is the allegation against Merck? After many years of marketing a drug without competitors, Merck lost its exclusivity for Zetia, a cholesterol-lowering drug. As a result, Merck should have lost its monopoly pricing power for Zetia since generic drugs could be sold that worked as well as Zetia. But, to keep its monopoly pricing power and its enormous profits, the plaintiff insurers claim that Merck paid a generic competitor not to sell a generic version of Zetia for five years. This practice of pharmaceutical companies is called “pay for delay.”

    The insurers argue that, as a result of Merck’s pay-for-delay agreement with the generic competitor, the insurers overpaid hundreds of millions of dollars for their enrollees’ cholesterol-lowering drugs.  They further argue that Merck profited from its wrongful behavior to the tune of billions of dollars.

    The generic drug manufacturer also reaped significant revenue for delaying production of a generic drug like Zetia.  Merck paid it handsomely to hold off. But, the insurers and their enrollees paid big time.

    What is to be done? The way to fix this pay-for-delay problem and all the other gaming that the pharmaceutical corporations engage in to maximize profits is for the government to regulate drug prices. Regulating drug prices would also save tens of thousands of lives a year, enabling people who currently go without lifesaving medicines because they can’t afford them to fill their prescriptions.

    At this moment, the Democrats in Congress are trying to find a way to bring down drug prices. But, so many Democrats, along with Republicans, are in the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies. It’s still not clear what they will be able to accomplish.

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  • To stay healthy, exercise, and sit less

    To stay healthy, exercise, and sit less

    To stay healthy, exercise appears necessary, but not sufficient.  We also should sit less, according to a new study published in Nature: Scientific Reports. Sitting too much may jeopardize your health.

    Two and a half hours a week of physical activity is important for a longer life and to deter all kinds of chronic conditions.  You should spend at least 20 minutes a day increasing your heart rate. That benefits your heart, your mind, your muscle, your skin and more.

    But, if you exercise for 20-30 minutes a day and then spend the rest of the day sitting, you may still jeopardize your health.  Sitting can increase your likelihood of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. It can lead to high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and extra body fat around the waist. And, it can hurt your cholesterol.

    The Mayo Clinic reports that, if you sit too much, it increases your risk of death from cancer and heart disease. A meta-analysis of 13 studies found that if you sit for eight hours a day straight, without any exercise, your risk of dying is analogous to the risks of dying from obesity and smoking.

    The New York Times reports that a 2019 study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology found a link between inactivity and fewer health benefits from exercise. It suggests that sitting for long periods could actually change our bodies. Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin studied a small group of healthy young people who sat four days in a row for at least 13 hours a day.

    The people in the study drank a fatty sugary ice cream shake on the fifth day. Not surprisingly, their bodies struggled to process the shake. More interestingly, even when the study participants exercised intensively for an hour at the end of the fourth day, their bodies struggled to process the shake on the fifth day. The metabolic results were similar, high blood sugar and triglyceride levels.

    What’s the solution? Take a break from sitting periodically, and walk around a little.

    The Nature: Scientific Reports researchers studied 64 men and women sitting for longer and shorter periods of time over four-day sessions. Those who sat more appeared to hurt their heart health. Those who stood more had better insulin and cholesterol levels, likely from increasing their blood flow and muscular contractions over the day.

    The more you use your muscles, the more blood sugar you burn. That, in turn, steadies your insulin levels and causes chemical activity that helps to lessen bad cholesterol.

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  • September: Healthy Aging Month

    September: Healthy Aging Month

    Did you know that September is Healthy Aging Month? Here are a few reminders on healthy aging for adults of any age.

    1. Stay connected to friends and family. Social bonds are important for physical and mental health. In fact, frequent social interactions have been shown to promote longer life.
    2. Get moving! Be physically active on a regular basis. Work in at least 150 minutes of moderately vigorous activity each week.  “Moderately vigorous” can be brisk walking (at a pace of 4 miles per hour), heavy cleaning, gardening, light bicycling, or doubles tennis.  Remember that any amount is better than none at all!
    3. Get enough rest. Aim for at least 7 to 7.5 hours of sleep. Sleep promotes energy, alertness as well as physical and mental well-being.
    4. Have an annual appointment with your primary care doctor, even if you are feeling great, find out what health screenings you are due for Know your cholesterol, body mass index, blood pressure, glucose, and A1C.  Medicare considers an annual wellness visit so important for older adults that it covers the full cost. Here are some tips to prepare for your doctor’s visit.
    5. Get up to date on your siblings’ and parents’ medical history. Many of us are able to report major family history regarding major diseases like cancer, stroke and heart attacks. These are important to know about, including the age at which they were diagnosed. Also make sure you are informed on family history of other conditions, such as allergies, asthma, auto-immune diseases, arthritis, osteoporosis, fractures, bleeding or clotting disorders, liver or kidney problems, migraines, dementia, skin conditions, cholesterol, diabetes or pre-diabetes, mental health, and gastrointestinal problems. This webtool from the U.S. Surgeon General may help. Share this information with your doctor and your family.
    6. Watch your diet, for reasons beyond weight. Many conditions, such as blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol, headaches, sleeping problems, mood, irritable bowel are substantially prevented, ameliorated and sometimes cured with dietary changes. Not sure what or how to change? Find a good nutritionist through your physician! Medicare covers nutrition counseling. A few basic points:  Get 4.5 cups of vegetables per day. Limit sugar intake. Eat lots of whole grains (What is a whole grain?) Avoid trans-fats entirely (“partially hydrogenated vegetable oils”).
    7. Here are some other great tips for healthy aging.