Lower Your Cholesterol Without Drugs! :

Heart disease is America's No. 1 killer, and even more women than men die yearly from it. Although you may hear more about breast cancer or prostate cancer, more than 13.2 million Americans are living with heart disease, and more than 910,000 Americans die yearly.

The health and fitness pros at eDiets can show you how to combine exercise and nutrition to get the best results. Click here to get started.

When excess blood cholesterol builds up in your artery walls, it can cause "hardening of the arteries," resulting in narrowed vessels that slow blood flow or block it. That's a heart attack.

Lowering your "lousy" LDL cholesterol and raising your "healthy" HDL cholesterol helps keep your risk for heart attack down. For the past 20 years, satins have been the drug of choice that doctors prescribe to lower LDL, but there are fewer medical options to raise HDL. And researchers think that it may be just as important to prevention of heart attack to raise HDL above 50 as it is to lower LDL below 130. However, Pfizer recently withdrew its application for approval of a new HDL-elevating drug called ILLUMINATE (torcetrapib) because of what they call an "imbalance of mortality and cardiovascular events," when used in combination with their LDL-lowering drug Lipitor.

There are controllable and uncontrollable risk factors for heart disease. When you drive a car, you take risks, but responsible people consider the risks before getting behind the wheel, and take all necessary and prudent precautions before turning the engine on. You make sure the engine is tuned, that you're not running on empty; you make sure the tires are inflated, and not bald; you follow the rules of the road, you signal when turning, and try to obey the speed limit. These are the controllable risk factors.

With your heart, you can control your diet ; you can keep saturated and trans fat to zero; you can include lots of fiber in your diet, both soluble and insoluble, and you can exercise daily; you can avoid smoking and stay away from smokers. But you can't control your genes.

Cholesterol: Good & Evil Twins
The liver produces different kinds of cholesterol. Like "good" and "evil" twins, the two cholesterols are related, but higher LDL means higher risk for heart disease. LDL cholesterol circulates fat through the body, increasing the risk that it will be deposited in the lining of the arteries where it can potentially cause a blockage -- a heart attack.

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