High cholesterol doesn’t come with symptoms, but it can still be a serious risk to your health. Cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins are commonly prescribed to bring your numbers back down into a healthy range and protect your heart. Still, many people pause before starting them, wondering whether alternatives to statins exist and what, if anything, can make a meaningful difference.
“I see patients all the time who don’t want to take statins to lower their cholesterol,” says Vanita Rahman, MD, an internal medicine and lifestyle medicine physician in Washington, DC. “They want to do it naturally, and that’s where we talk about diet and lifestyle changes.”
For some people, the concern is side effects, most commonly muscle pain. Others are hesitant about long-term medication or want to see how much improvement is possible through diet and lifestyle first.
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