21-Day Vegan Kickstart / a Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) site

Thank you for the replies, yes it does help!

I have never been on cholesterol lowering meds as yet. Even with an LDL of 110 the Dr wants to put me on, but I'm trying to do what I can to lower it myself.

I looked on my Labs and the total Cholesterol is 171 with LDL at 110 and HDL at 31. Chol/Hdl ratio is 5.52 (range is 3.5-5.0) so if I can get the ratio down a bit more I should be able to avoid meds. The diabetes (type 2) is why the Dr wants it lower, and under 70 for the LDL.

What types of plant foods are high in saturated fats? I thought just by switching to plant we were automatically lowering saturated fats and cholesterol. I use only olive oil for oil and do eat a low fat diet.

I suppose I could be fighting a losing battle if the hereditary factor is a big part of this. I just never thought of LDL at 110 as being high. Since LDL and HDL numbers don't add up to 171 there must be another component of cholesterol included, perhaps not as troublesome though.

Please let me know if there is a list of any kind that shows the plant food lowest in sat fat.

Thanks for "listening."

Dee

BTW Triglycerides were 152. Range is 30-150 so that should be coming down too I hope, although its not really bad.

Total chol is a formula composed of hdl, ldl, triglycerides and a couple other components in a weighted formula (so it's not just added all together, it's some percentage hdl plus some percentage ldl and so on - it's possible to google to find it but it's really not worth the effort to calculate it yourself; suffice to say that if ldl and such are higher than they need to be, that's enough). My doctor generally ignores my total cholesterol number because my hdl runs high and throws the calculation out of whack - the ratio, though, is good and the numbers individually are good. We've got a 'deal' - as long as my hdl is over 50 and my ldl is under 100, no cholesterol meds despite that being SOP for type 2 diabetes.

As far as fat, be careful to watch for hidden fats if you're eating any kind of processed food, any food you didn't make yourself. Particularly ugly are the partially hydrogenated fats that live in all sorts of things like bread, nut butters, margarine, etc. And, one of the major 'tenets' in the kickstart is to keep ALL fat to at or under 10% of calories. So, for the 'typical' 2000 calories per day (That's what the RDA values are based on) that'd be 200 calories or about 22 grams of fat total. For example, that olive oil is 40 calories per tsp, all of which is fat. Which means that's 40/200 or 20% of the total fat per day, assuming that you're eating 2000 calories per day. One tsp in your salad at lunch and one tsp in your cooking at dinner is almost half the day's allocation of fat.

And, yes, there's a hereditary component BUT that does NOT mean to just give up. If your body does produce extra cholesterol, you don't want to go adding to that if you don't have to.