THE DANGERS OF CHOLESTEROL

High rates of heart disease are commonly found in countrieswhere the diet is heavy with meat and dairy products containing alot of saturated fats. However, high-fat diets and high rates ofheart disease don't inevitably go hand-in-hand.People living on the Greek island of Crete have very low ratesof heart disease even though their diet is high in fat. Most oftheir dietary fat comes from olive oil, a monounsaturated fat thattends to lower levels of "bad" cholesterol.The Inuit, or Eskimo, people of Alaska and Greenland also arerelatively free of heart disease despite a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet. The staple food in their diet is fish rich inomega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids.Some research has shown that omega-3 fatty acids, found infish such as salmon and mackerel as well as in soybean and canolaoil, lower cholesterol and triglyceride levels in the blood.Some nutrition experts recommend eating fish once or twice aweek to reduce heart disease risk.What you should be doing is removing as much of thesaturated fat from our diet as you can. We need to select foods thatare lower in total fat and especially in saturated fat." In a nutshell, that means eating fewer foods of animal origin, such as meat and whole-milk dairy products, and more plant foods such as vegetables and grains.