A healthy diet is an effective way to keep your body healthy and control your cholesterol levels. Diet and exercise will help your body maintain a desirable weight and can reduce your risk for chronic illness. Foods like grilled salmon provide essential nutrition that your body needs to function at an optimal level and also provide health benefits like a reduced risk of heart disease, which is related to high cholesterol levels.
Types of Cholesterol
Cholesterol is a substance that your body uses for many biological functions including cell physiology and in the production of hormones. Therefore your body needs some cholesterol in order to be healthy. However, if your body has too much cholesterol in your bloodstream over a long period of time, you can develop plaque that can clog your arteries and lead to serious problems like heart attack or stroke.
Omega-3 Fatty Acids
Grilled salmon is part of a healthy diet because it provides essential dietary fat that your body needs called omega-3 fatty acids. This fat is a healthy source of fat because it is unsaturated. Saturated forms of fat can cause your body to increase your LDL, or bad cholesterol. Therefore eating unsaturated fat is part of a healthy diet because it does not increase the undesirable forms of cholesterol. Omega-3 fatty acids also have health benefits like reducing inflammation and they lower the risk of chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer and arthritis.
Benefits
Eating a healthy diet that includes grilled salmon will give you health benefits. The omega-3 fatty acids found in salmon can increase HDL, or good cholesterol, and decrease triglycerides in the blood. Both of these factors are important in lowering your risk for heart disease. A serving of grilled salmon contains around 112 mg of dietary cholesterol and it is recommended that you eat less than 300 mg of dietary cholesterol per day.
Considerations
If you want to lower your cholesterol and decrease your risk of heart disease and other forms of chronic illness, you have to eat a nutritious diet. But eating grilled salmon alone is not sufficient in promoting a healthy lifestyle. A healthy diet should include a variety of fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, water, lean meat, healthy vegetable oil and fish like salmon. It is also important to mention that you should avoid foods high in saturated fat, trans fat, refined carbohydrates, sugar and sodium. All of these guidelines will contribute to your overall health and will keep your cholesterol in a healthy range.
