Q: I just received my blood work back. My total cholesterol and LDL are high, and HDL is low. I just want to be sure that coconut milk is ok for me to use and that the foods on the ok list are good in order to lower cholesterol.
I know I will need to exercise since I have a lot of extra pounds, and hopefully that will help lower my cholesterol, but I want to know if there is anything else I can do to lower the bad and raise the good cholesterol.
A: If you have high cholesterol it is best to clear the dietary changes on this program with your physician first.
Having said that, although there might be several different reasons for your cholesterol being high- genetics being one of them- Dr. Wentz has observed that there are two things that are very relevant to high cholesterol levels that are often overlooked. One is optimal thyroid function. If you’re not on the correct dosage of thyroid hormone and not the correct type, you can have elevated cholesterol just as a result of that. Making sure that your TSH is between 0.5 and 2 is very important, and also that your free T3 and free T4 are in the upper half of the reference range. For more information on different types of thyroid medication and reference ranges you might want to read these 2 articles by Dr. Wentz: A Pharmacist’s Review of Medications for Hashimoto’s and Hypothyroidism and Top 10 Thyroid Tests and How to Interpret Them. I’ll have the team link them in the transcript.
The second thing that Dr. Wentz recommends with high cholesterol is looking into your adrenals (as you are doing) to make sure that you are converting some of that cholesterol into more adrenal hormones. Cholesterol is a precursor to adrenal hormones, and most people don’t produce enough of them. That is one of the many reasons why it is important to support the adrenals, as we are doing in this program. We're focusing on your adrenals and getting you to convert some of that cholesterol into more adrenal hormones. By giving you all of these cofactors and nutrients we're hoping that you're going to be producing more, by converting more of that cholesterol into adrenal hormones. By the end of this program, when you remeasure your cholesterol to verify if there's an improvement, you’ll be able to see if it was an adrenal issue.
Another thing that some people find helpful is taking Niacin (you might want to discuss it with your practitioner to see if it could help with your cholesterol levels).