Last week, I explained how preventing heart disease has very little to do with lowering cholesterol with statin drugs.

Today, I am going to tell you how to lower your heart disease risk as well as your cholesterol using a comprehensive dietary and lifestyle approach.

==> Dietary Recommendations to Help Prevent Cardiovascular Disease

The first step in preventing heart disease is to eat a healthy diet. Increase your consumption of whole foods rich in phytonutrients, plant molecules that give your body the nutrients it needs.

Here are some practical tips:

Lowering cholesterol can be harmful to your health.

Sound crazy? It’s true.

In fact, a recent study in “The New England Journal of Medicine” shows that even if your bad cholesterol (LDL) is under 70, statin drugs don’t protect you if your good (HDL) cholesterol is also low.

That’s obvious if you know the real cause of heart disease -- which is sugar, not fat.

It is sugar that drives the good cholesterol down and causes metabolic syndrome or pre-diabetes. That is the true cause of most heart attacks, NOT LDL cholesterol.

Why don’t you hear about this?

Well, there is no good drug to raise HDL.

Statin drugs lower LDL -- and billions are spent advertising them, even though they are the wrong treatment.

If you’re like most of the patients whom I see in my practice, you’re convinced that cholesterol is the evil that causes heart disease.

If you hope that if you monitor your cholesterol levels and avoid the foods that are purported to raise cholesterol, you’ll be safe from America’s number-one killer.

Why are you afraid of cholesterol?

Because for years, well-meaning doctors, echoed by the media, have emphasized what they long believed is the intimate link between cholesterol and death by heart disease.

If only it were so simple!

But the truth is much more complex.