Five Lifestyle Habits That May Insidiously Raise Your Cholesterol Levels

High cholesterol is one of the risk factors for cardiovascular diseases that plague many Finns. Especially if your blood cholesterol levels have been high previously, or if high cholesterol is hereditary in your family, you should have your levels measured frequently.

Genetic factors play a role in cholesterol levels. In addition, certain medications and diseases can raise cholesterol levels. However, lifestyle choices and eating habits also have a significant impact.

These five lifestyle habits can increase bad cholesterol levels in the blood in daily life, sometimes even somewhat insidiously.

1. Unfiltered coffee can increase the amount of harmful cholesterol

Especially heavy coffee drinkers should pay attention to how their coffee is prepared.

Most Finnish homes have a coffee maker where coffee drips into the pot through a paper filter bag. The filter bag is not only handy, but it also traps a fat compound harmful to cholesterol called cafestol.

Cafestol, found in coffee beans, specifically raises the level of bad cholesterol (LDL) in the blood. Press pots, moka pots, and capsule machines do not use a paper filter, which means cafestol also ends up in the cup of coffee. An automatic coffee machine may dispense coffee filtered or unfiltered, depending on the brand and model of the machine.

One cup of unfiltered coffee a day does not significantly affect cholesterol levels, but if you drink more coffee during the day, you should pay attention to this.

2. Excessive alcohol consumption also affects cholesterol

You may have come across research findings that suggest people who consume alcohol in moderation may even have a lower risk of cardiovascular disease than those who do not drink at all.

However, according to the latest research, even moderate alcohol consumption does not help reduce the risk of illness, and excessive alcohol consumption, in particular, can increase the amount of bad cholesterol in the blood.

Alcohol affects different people in slightly different ways and generally affects women more than men. The limit for moderate alcohol consumption is less than 14 units per week for men and less than seven units per week for women.

3. Smoking affects cholesterol levels in many ways

Smoking can both raise bad cholesterol levels (LDL) and lower good cholesterol levels (HDL), which would help regulate total cholesterol. HDL cholesterol helps transport excess cholesterol to the liver, thereby removing cholesterol from the body.

Smoking is also one of the risk factors for atherosclerosis, a condition where cholesterol and inflammatory cells accumulate in the arterial walls over time, hardening into plaques and continuing to thicken over the years. As they thicken, plaques can cause narrowing or even blockages in blood vessels.

4. Too little exercise and too much sitting lower good cholesterol levels

The harms of inactivity have been widely discussed. One of these harms is precisely related to cholesterol. Being inactive and sitting for too long reduces the amount of good cholesterol (HDL) in the blood.

Inactivity can also lead to abdominal obesity and associated fatty liver, which also lower the amount of good cholesterol.

Conversely, abundant and moderately strenuous endurance exercise increases the amount of good cholesterol, which helps balance total cholesterol.

5. Too many hard fats and eggs in the diet

The biggest influencing factor for dietary cholesterol is the quality of fats: hard fats are bad for cholesterol levels and soft fats are good.

Especially animal-based fats, found in butter, cheese, fatty milk, fatty pastries, and fatty meat, contain a lot of hard fats, so they should be eaten only in moderation.

Plant-based fats, found in vegetable oils and nuts, for example, contain a lot of soft fats. The Heart Symbol on food products indicates that the amount of hard fat in the product is not high.

Egg yolk is also known to contain a lot of cholesterol. If blood cholesterol is high, eggs should be eaten surprisingly sparingly: 3–4 eggs per week.

How to find out your cholesterol level?

If you recognized one or more of the lifestyle habits that raise cholesterol in your daily life, you should have your total cholesterol measured.

A good way to find out your cholesterol level is a home total cholesterol test, which is done from a drop of blood taken from a fingertip. With an easy and reliable rapid test, total cholesterol can be seen in two minutes.

Text: Emmi Niiniaho