How to reduce cholesterol: medications

Persons suffering from high cholesterol stand in great danger of heart disease. High cholesterol can lead to heart attack and stroke. High cholesterol is caused by poor diet and lack of exercise.
By poor diet, we mean a diet too high in certain kinds of foods. These foods include animal products - meat, milk, cheese, eggs, cream, butter, etc. - and also processed foods such as cookies and crackers, doughnuts and white bread. Too much fatty, greasy food leads to high cholesterol levels. When you combine too much of this sort of food with little or no physical activity, little or no jogging, walking, hiking, and sports, high cholesterol levels are bound to occur.

When you have high cholesterol levels you have fatty deposits building up in your arteries. Imagine that a system of dirty pipes is leading to your garden hose outside. Whenever you turn the water on, these pipes feed leaves, dirt, and other debris into your hose, which stick to its insides and make its channel narrower and narrower. Soon, it will be difficult for the water to get through the hose; it will be blocked by all the debris. The hose will swell, twist, and finally burst.
Your arteries are just like the hose. When they become too full of nasty debris (fatty acids), the block the blood from flowing. When the blood can't get to the heart and brain, terrible things occur. You'll lose concentration, sleep, you'll have bad moods. You'll feel intense heart pain; you may even suffer a severe stroke or a heart attack.
The good news is that you can fight high cholesterol levels in your body. First you'll need to set up an appointment with your doctor, who can administer a blood test to see exactly where you are. Then you can work with your doctor to formulate a plan to combat high levels of cholesterol.
The way to fight high levels of cholesterol is through eating healthily and exercising. Healthy eating should include large doses of natural food every day. Natural food is food that grows right out of the earth, fruits, vegetables, beans, and grains. These foods are full of vitamins and minerals and antioxidants - they will help to flush the bad elements out of your system, and keep the good ones in.
There are also medications to help you lower your cholesterol levels. These can be lumped into three main kinds.
1. Niacin (vitamin B-3). Niacin is a medication that has been proven through research to lower cholesterol levels. It does so by blocking certain secretions in the bloodstream which lead to bad buildups of deposits. Most dosages of niacin include a mere 20 mgs of the medication. To fight high cholesterol, however, you'll need 500 mgs of it each day.
2. HMG-CoA inhibitors, or statins. Statins are an important medication whose feature is that they stop an enzyme in your body that changes the fat you eat into cholesterol. Statins have proved to be the most effective medication for helping to reduce high cholesterol levels available. For some patients it was only a matter of weeks before they saw their cholesterol levels drop.
3. Fibric acid derivatives. These medications are not as good at fighting high cholesterol levels as statins are, but research did show that they helped to raise levels of good cholesterol (HDL) while simultaneously lowering levels of bad cholesterol (LDL).
As with any medication, you should consult with your doctor on if you should take it, when you should take it, and how much you should take it. Medications have proved to be very effective in the fight against high cholesterol, but each body differs and requires a different plan of attack. When you see your doctor, you should ask how medication scan be included in your overall plan of healthy diet and exercise.Through the process of experiment you can arrive at a plan of healthy diet, exercise, and medication to lower the levels of bad cholesterol in your system and thus lead a happier, healthier life.