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Good morning and welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition's new midweek segment called Ask a Nutrition. Now let's get started. Good morning and welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition's

new midweek segment called Ask a Nutritionist. My name is Brandy Burrow. I'm a licensed and

registered dietitian with nutritional weight and wellness. On today's show, I'll be answering

a nutrition question re-received from our Dishing Up Nutrition listeners.

So today's question, can very high or genetic cholesterol be managed with nutrition?

I heard you can't out diet, you can't out fitness, and you can't out supplement this condition.

So this is a really great question and this is a

topic that comes up a lot with my clients in clinic. So first off, why do we really care about

cholesterol? Why are we so concerned if we have high cholesterol? Well, cholesterol has been used

as a way to assess our risk of developing heart

disease or having a heart attack or stroke. And this is a lab test that you probably get

checked every time you get a physical. So it's very routine and you probably know what your

numbers are. And if your cholesterol levels

come back slightly elevated, you may be recommended to go on a cholesterol lowering medication.

That's kind of the traditional way to manage that. And I just want to point out here that we are

learning so much more about cholesterol and what some other predictors of someone's risk of developing heart disease are.

And we're finding that cholesterol is not actually the best predictor of somebody's risk.

There are now more advanced tests that correlate much better with

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