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It’s easy to associate high cholesterol with age. The more years you spend on this earth, the more time your bad habits have to cause damage to your body, right? But recent studies have actually shown that high cholesterol is prevalent not just among adults, but teenagers and even children. With those numbers in mind, it’s quite possible for young adults to have high cholesterol without realizing it. Teenagers turn into young adults, after all. And since doctors don’t tend to look for high cholesterol in younger individuals, it can easily go untreated for years. That is a tragedy, because the longer you wait to get a handle on your cholesterol, the harder it will be. That happens for two reasons A) your cholesterol will simply be higher, and so it has further to drop and B) You are even more accustomed to the habits that caused the issue. So, here is what to do if you are young with high cholesterol, so you can manage the situation early.
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Drink no more, and no less, than this
Moderate alcohol consumption has been shown to improve cholesterol levels, but don’t take that information as an excuse to hit the bottle. Research has found that exactly one drink per day for women can improve cholesterol levels—no less, but no more. The ethanol in alcohol raises high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL) otherwise known as the good cholesterol.
