The first step in to lower cholesterol would be to adopt a healthy lifestyle that includes low cholesterol diet. Consuming low fat, low in saturated fat and low in cholesterol foods combined with highly nutritious foods that provide your body the energy and ability to cleanse and regulate its hormonal levels and cholesterol levels is the first key to success in reducing cholesterol and eliminating the risk.

But devoting oneself to a healthy diet that promotes low cholesterol is not enough. You must always be in control, analyze your cholesterol condition, monitor and maintain the results if you really want to win the battle against high cholesterol.

It’s important to note, that there are absolutely no symptoms indicating your diet has succeeded in lowering cholesterol, in the same way there are no symptoms for high cholesterol levels. Te only way to ever know if your low cholesterol diet has paid off is to check your cholesterol level annually through a simple cholesterol test.

Analyzing and monitoring your cholesterol test reading is relatively a simple task: if your total cholesterol level is below 200mg/dl, than you’re basically on the right rack with your diet. But that’s not all. After you have fasted to take the LDL blood cholesterol test, take note that anything above 100-120 mg/dl means bad news. LDL is considered the bad cholesterol that builds up in your arteries and promotes to arthesclerosis or the hardening and narrowing of the arteries. Your HDL levels, the good cholesterol that cleanse and regulates your cholesterol levels should be above 40 mg/dl.

Another factor that will indicate if your diet efforts have paid of is the ratio between the LDL and HDL in your blood. A ratio in the neighborhood of 4 is good while above 7 ratio puts you in a risk for a heart disease. A low in saturated fat and low cholesterol diet can assist you in maintaining a good LDL HDL ratio, lower LDL levels and increased HDL levels in the blood. Testing cholesterol that includes 12 hour fasting prior to the test and measuring HDL, LDL, triglycerides and the ratio between LDL and HDL should be performed annually and even more frequent than that if you were diagnosed with alarming results or are belong to a risk group.