Top 9 Ways to Lower Your Triglycerides! Must See!

Hey, if your doctor told you your triglycerides are too high, in this video I'm going to give you the nine ways to lower your triglycerides naturally. Hello and welcome to Total Health with Dr. Nick, where my purpose is to inspire, empower, and motivate you to live longer, healthier, and more abundant lives. And I think you're going to get a lot of great benefits out of this video because this is really all about your triglycerides and how to lower them naturally. So many of you guys have been giving those bad reports from your doctor saying you got to get your triglycerides down or you're going to have a heart attack. You're set up for cardiovascular disease or mitochondrial infarction. Well in this video, like I said, I'm going to give you the nine best ways to lower your triglycerides naturally. And guys, if you like what we're talking about, make sure you like, share, comment, and subscribe. Make sure you click that little bell notification so you get notified anytime I do a video. And if you're looking for more information about the ketogenic diet and want to get in the best shape of your life, check out my keto course. The link is down below. I think you'll find it the best keto course out there. And hey, if you want some more personalized attention anywhere in the world, you guys can be anywhere. And yes, we can work together. A lot of you asked me for particular coaching, more personalized coaching, and I'd be more than happy to help you with that. So I'll put a link down below so that way you can get more information about that too. Well let's go ahead and get started with the nine ways to lower your triglycerides naturally. Number one, first of all, what are triglycerides? Well, our bodies are designed to store. I mean, our ancestors are hunter-gatherers, so they always knew they're never going to know when they're going to get a food source again. So they don't know if they're going to get nuts, seeds, berries, a big game kill, or something. So they don't know when they're going to eat. So our bodies got very, very good at adapting and storing food. So after you eat, your body converts calories you don't need into triglycerides because these are stored pockets of energy that are stored in fat. So if you take in too many carbs, your body will convert them to triglycerides. Now what is a triglyceride? Well, triglyceride is also three fatty acid molecules stuck together by a backbone made of glycerol, okay? So triglyceride, three fatty acids stuck together by a backbone made of glycerol. So that's really what it is. It's a way our body stores fats. While triglycerides are an important supply of energy, we absolutely need it. Once again, our ancestors didn't know when they were going to have food again, so they had to be able to store. So our bodies got really good at doing that. The problem is too many triglycerides put you at a risk for heart disease. That's the biggest risk factor we see with it. So don't worry about your cholesterol so much. Worry more about your triglycerides. That's really a more important factor where cholesterol has been getting all the bad press over the years. It's really, really not a bad thing. In fact, I did a couple of very good videos on that where I talked about the myths about cholesterol and is too low cholesterol dangerous for your health. So check those out. Adults, about 25 percent, are going to have levels that are too high. Now where do you want to be? You want to be around 150 milligrams per deciliter. So that's the number you want to be at or below. So what are ways we can lower this? Well, number one, keep a healthy body weight. Now notice I said not a low body weight. Just because you're light doesn't mean you're healthy. There are plenty of patients who are sick, maybe with cancer, who are light, in fact maybe too light, but yet you're not healthy. You do want to have a healthy body weight. So being too low, being too low in body fat, especially for ladies, isn't good for your hormones. So you do want to keep a certain amount of body fat. But a healthy muscle to fat ratio, that's really a good determinant of health, is that when you have a good amount of muscle to fat, not where you're emaciated, but also have low fat too. That's not a healthy way to be. So working towards a moderate body weight by consuming fewer excess calories can be an effective way to lower your bodies and your blood's triglycerides. In fact, research shows that losing even a modest five to ten percent, okay, of your body weight can significantly reduce triglycerides. Now we see that many of you will lower your body weight five pounds, ten pounds, fifteen, sometimes thirty, forty pounds, and all of a sudden you're off of all your medications. You're off your cholesterol meds, you're off your heart medications, and maybe you're even off your antidepressants. Yes, by getting your body into a normal body weight you can reduce, if not eliminate, virtually all the different medications you take. Now I certainly understand some medications or maybe you need to actually keep your body alive. Now I understand that, but for the most part many of the medications that we're on are lifetime medications that doctors like to put us on, but the reality is a healthier body weight will actually help you to get off of that. Not only that, while the goal is to sustain weight loss long term, some studies show that actually even if you lose the weight but then put it back on, your body still has the ability to keep the triglycerides down. So even though you might bump it back up a little bit and get a little higher in your weight than you were previously, you will actually still be able to keep your triglycerides down. So lose the body weight but stay in a nice healthy range. Next, reduce added sugar. Sugars are the biggest factor. Sugars, and I'll give you a little bit of a hint, is sugars and carbs. Okay, really those two are the worst factors when it comes because your body uses sugar as fuel and hey, if you don't need it, it's going to store it. Once again, when are you going to maybe catch something again? When are you going to get a game? When are you going to get an elk or who knows, a bear maybe? You don't know when you're going to get it again. You don't know when you're going to get a deer again or something, so you want to store energy. Well, we don't have that problem anymore. Now we have affluenza, so we're abundant with too much food around. In fact, we throw a lot of food away that would feed starving countries for a year. So we throw away so much food because we have abundance of food now. We have way too many calories. In fact, most restaurants you go to, especially things like maybe the Cheesecake Factory, if you have that near you, I'm going to come out with like a wheelbarrow of salad. I mean, the salads are super, super piled high. You might have an order of chicken. It might come with three or four chicken breasts with it, which is way too much for any one person to eat. So anyway, added sugar commonly found in sweets, soda drinks, fruit juice may be turned into triglycerides. That's the biggest thing. Added sugar commonly found in sweets, soft drinks, and fruit juice may be turned into triglycerides, which can lead to an increase in blood triglyceride levels along with heart disease risk factors. So once again, we keep coming back to our heart disease risk. One 15-year study showed that those who consumed at least 25% of their calories from sugar were twice as likely to die from heart disease than those who consumed less than 10% of their calories from sugar. So once again, you get less percent of your calories from sugar, you bump up your lifespan significantly. So keep the added sugar down. Now, notice I said added sugar because there's the regular sugar that automatically comes with the carbohydrates. This is just added sugar on top of it. Many of you have heard that Cokes have like 12 teaspoons of sugar in it. So there's so much added sugar in drinks, dressings, lots of different things, not just soft drinks. Next is lower carbs. Once again, these two go hand in hand, carbs and sugars. I like to say carbs and sugars are virtually the same thing except that carbs are typically more of your complex carbs, and we talk about that. Sugars are simple carbs reduced down to sugars. So much like added sugar, extra calories from carbs are converted and stored in fat cells. One 2006 study looked at how various carb intakes affected triglycerides. Those who were given a low carb diet providing about 26% of their calories from carbs had greater reductions in triglyceride levels than those given higher carb diets providing up to So there it is again. Lower the percentage of your calories from carbs and you lower your triglycerides. You lower your stored fat. It's as simple as that. This study here is even more interesting because many of you are thinking, well, what if I just reduce my fats, Dr. Nick? I just won't eat fats and then I can't store the fat. Isn't that correct? Isn't that true? Well, you would think, you would think, well, if you take in fats, they get stored as fat. But even more importantly is the carbohydrates that get stored as fat. So watch this. A 2003 study compared low-fat and low-carb diets. All right. After six months, researchers found that those on the low-carb diet had greater decreases in triglyceride levels than those on the low-fat diet. I know it doesn't sound logical. You're thinking, well, wait a minute. Doesn't fat make me fat? Well, for those of you who are a little bit new to my channel, think about this. When farmers are trying to fatten up cows for slaughter, they're not giving them fat. They're giving them grains. They're giving them carbohydrates. The carbohydrates fatten us up. As soon as the dietary guidelines started coming out in the 70s about reducing fats as a way to reduce heart disease, our diabetes spiked. Why? Because the carbs went up. If you reduce fats, you have to increase carbs because you want to stay satiated. So when you increase carbs, that's when we started to putting on so much more weight in the 70s, 80s, 90s. And of course, diabetes is one of the fastest growing diseases we have right now. So by lowering carbs, you lower triglycerides even more effectively than lowering fats. Next, eat more fiber. So fiber, here's the thing. A lot of you thinking, well, can I get my fiber from my grains? Well, of course you can, but it's not the best way to get it. I wouldn't do it that way. You don't want to get your fiber from all the carbs that you're trying to reduce, okay? You want to get your fiber from vegetables. It's just that simple. You're going to get a lot more fiber actually from your vegetables and your calories a lot lower. It's a fact that about one pound of vegetables is roughly 100 to 125 calories. So you can reduce your calories and still fill up on bulk. And bulk is from fiber and water. Those two put together make up bulk, which is great for At the same time, it helps reduce triglycerides. Including more fiber in your diet can slow down absorption. That's a key thing. It's slowing down the absorption of these carbs, which are then converted. Absorption of fat and sugar in your small intestine helping you decrease the amount of triglycerides in your blood. Secondly, according to one study of 117 adults, right? So significant study. With overweight or obesity, eating more dietary fiber is linked to lower triglyceride levels. So there we have it again. Increase fiber in your diet. Next, regular exercise. Now this has so many benefits, of course. Ladies, you know I talk about this a lot. You want to get off the Boniva and the Fosamax. Start increasing weight training. So I don't mean just exercising doing swimming. I don't mean just using exercise bands. I'm talking about some weight training. Now it doesn't mean you're going to bulk up, so don't worry about that. But it will help you start to get better insulin sensitivity. So those are two key factors. But aerobic exercise can increase the amount of HDL cholesterol. And HDL cholesterol is the one that, I know they call it the good cholesterol, but there really is no good or bad cholesterol. HDL cholesterol isn't even cholesterol. It's a carrier molecule. High-density lipoprotein. HDL, that's what that means. That's what your body uses to go around and get all the cholesterol from your arteries that isn't used up and the parts of your body when it's not used up and bring it back to the liver for processing. So when it comes back to the liver now, it gets converted into LDL cholesterol, not the bad cholesterol, to be used to make hormones. So cholesterol is actually very, very good. The benefits of exercise on triglycerides are most apparent long-term. All right, so this is not just a short-term benefit. It's long-term exercise regimens. One study in people with heart disease showed that exercise during 45 minutes five times per week led to a significant decline in blood triglycerides. So exercise now. Do you have to do 45 minutes? No. In fact, I wouldn't even recommend going above that. My workouts are never more than 45 minutes because after 45 minutes, you start making more cortisol. So keep your workouts 20 minutes if you want. Do it high intensity for 20 minutes. And genetically, some of you are better designed for that. And when we do genetic testing on our patients and people from all over, which we can do, we can ship you a kit and then you take your DNA samples. We get the results back and then from there, we're able to then look at your DNA, your SNPs as we call it, single nucleotide polymorphism, and we're able to determine what's the best workout program for you because you may have the type of genes that gives you slower recovery or genes that give you faster recovery or elite genes, which means you can work out harder than the average person. So this is all done during genetic testing. But the thing is, you can at least work out 20 minutes a day, three or four times a week and get amazing benefits at lowering your triglycerides. Next, omega-3 fats. Now everybody knows about omega-3 fats at this point. Omega-3 fats are the ones that are anti-inflammatory. Anytime you can reduce inflammation, it's always going to be a good thing in the body because inflammation is linked as one of the major causes of virtually any disease. So fatty fish are well known for its benefits on heart health and ability to lower blood triglycerides. One study showed that eating salmon twice a week significantly decreased blood triglyceride concentration. Now we're not just talking about salmon here, okay? So there's lots of different cold water fish. There's lots of different fatty fish. So salmon is one of them, but other ones include herring, sardines, which many of you hear me talking about all the time. I eat a lot of sardines. I don't eat much herring and I don't eat much mackerel, but tuna is another good one. And I know a lot of you are worried about the tuna and worried about the mercury. And there is mercury, but you know what? A good amount of selenium helps offset the mercury. So if foods that are higher in selenium than they are mercury is actually very beneficial. So you can be okay with that. So don't feel so worried about the mercury in the tuna. What you should be more worried about, and doctors are never talking about this, is the mercury in your fillings, okay? There's a joke I had many years ago, a cartoon, where two sharks were talking to each other. One shark says to the other, hey, I hear we can't eat humans anymore because they have too much mercury in their fillings. And there's a lot of truth to that. You know, we look at the mercury in seafood because of the concentration, but we neglect the mercury in our teeth, which is a higher concentration. So be more worried about that. So like I said, mackerel, these are many fish that are especially high in omega-3 fats. So increase your omega-3 fats. Hey, if you don't want to get it through a fish source, or I should say eating fish, then there's also oils. Carlson makes great oils, cod liver oil. They also have an oil, I believe it's called the ultimate fish oil. That's another great one. So make sure you get your DHA and EPA from your fish oils that you can get from fish oil supplements, capsules, I'm sorry, gel caps, or you could also get it where you basically pour it on a spoon and drink it that way. Also too, omega-3 fats are in tree nuts. Now you notice I didn't say the ones under the ground, like peanuts. Peanuts are under the ground. Peanuts are technically a legume. They are moldy. That's the problem. Most people don't have allergies to peanuts. They have allergies to the mold because peanuts grow underground and they have a very porous shell which allows the mold to get inside. So tree nuts are actually much, much better. So tree nuts give you a concentration of the omega-3 fats, but it also gives you the fiber that we talked about previously as another added benefit. So tree nuts are actually very, very good. Tree nuts include almonds, pecans, walnuts, cashews, pistachios, Brazil nuts, and one of my favorites, macadamia nuts. Now I will say this. Be careful when it comes to things like cashews. Cashews are in the same family as poison ivy, so you have to be careful. If you're sensitive to poison ivy, you don't do well with cashews. Also, cashews are a lectin. They have lectins in it. Go back and watch the video I did on lectins where I talked about that because lectins are actually plant chemicals that the plant uses to fight off predators like you and me because they can't run, they can't smack anybody, they can't do anything like that. So they have plant chemicals they give off, and many of you notice you eat certain foods like beans and you may get bloated afterward. Technically, gluten is a lectin. So for those of you who are gluten sensitive, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You eat a little speck of it and you blow up, okay? You're thinking, I didn't eat that much, but yet for some reason I'm swollen. That's because of the lectins. So cashews have lectins in it. And last but not least, and I know this is the one you're going to hate the most, but watch out for alcohol. Alcohol has sugar in it. So sugars and alcohol get converted to triglycerides. So be careful with that. Now, am I saying never to drink again? No. So you don't have to beat up the messenger here, but be careful with it because when you drink too much, obviously it's not good for your liver in general because your liver is trying to detox your body. And know this too, guys, if you're trying to lose weight, if you're trying to lose fat, your body always looks at alcohol like a poison. It's going to go after that first before it goes after the fat. So you're not going to burn fat. So know this, if you're drinking beer every night, if you're drinking alcohol, and I know you're probably thinking, well, I'm drinking a clear alcohol. It's better for me. Yeah, it's better for you, but it's still sugar and your body still treats it as a poison where it goes after that and looks at that as a priority rather than fat burning. So alcoholic beverages are often high in sugars, carbs, and calories, which can be converted to triglycerides. Studies show that a moderate amount of alcohol consumption, so you're okay with a little bit here, can increase blood triglycerides by up to 53%. So once again, err on the side of lower than moderate to high, even if your triglyceride levels are normal to begin with. So they will become elevated. All right. So am I saying never to drink? No, I'm not saying that, but I am saying keep it in moderation to lower than moderation. Cause if you're in moderation, you're still going to increase your triglycerides. And if you are at risk, then, you know, for a fact, you need to lower yours. Well guys, hope you love the information. If you do make sure you check out my other videos, because if you're like this one, I know you're going to love those too. And guys, thanks a lot for supporting my channel. I love it. Appreciate you. God bless. This is Dr. Nick. I'll see you on the next video. Bye-bye.