What have grapefruit to do with lowering cholesterol?

If you’re trying to lower your cholesterol you have quite a number of choices. Yesterday we wrote about lowering cholesterol naturally.

And our choice is always to try natural methods to lower cholesterol, because we don’t like to see people taking the risks of using cholesterol lowering drugs like statin drugs to lower cholesterol because of risks associated with these drugs.

And you need to remember that if you’ve been told by your doctor to lower your cholesterol and he’s prescribed statin drugs to you to do this, he is, in effect, asking you to stay on statins for the rest of your life.

Because once you’ve started on them they may work, but if you stop your cholesterol goes back up unless you’ve changed something else significant in your life as well.

Anyway, we’ve been reading about one of the other considerations of using drugs like statins to lower cholesterol levels. It’s called the “grapefruit effect”.

No it doesn’t mean that if you eat lots of grapefruit you can lower your cholesterol by eating grapefruit. In fact it’s the opposite.

Scientists have found that if you are on cholesterol lowering prescription drugs like statins, that if you eat grapefruit then this will increase the levels of these drugs in your bloodstream without you actually taking any more of them.

Canadian scientists together with scientists from the University of Michigan found that an enzyme in your stomach interferes with the breakdown of these prescription drugs and so, as it stops them from breaking down in your stomach, will increase the blood levels of these drugs.

And eating grapefruit increases this to potentially toxic levels. It’s not currently understood why.

And it seems that the effects of eating grapefruit on these drugs varies from person to person too.

Another reason why you ought to consider more natural cholesterol lowering supplements together with some basic diet and lifestyle changes.

We would always prefer to start with natural methods rather than take the risks associated with cholesterol lowering drugs.

So if you’re already using cholesterol lowering drugs it may pay you to find out a little more about the “grapefruit effect”, especially if you love grapefruit.




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