3 foods to help improve your cholesterol

When it comes to keeping your heart healthy, you shouldn't omit any food groups. Here are three foods that will allow you to reduce your levels of "bad" cholesterol.

• Super-nutrients: Allicin, and other sulfur compounds that may help reduce blood pressure and high cholesterol.
• Serving size: One to two small cloves, or about four grams (1/8 ounce) (4 kcal).
• Benefits: Regularly eating garlic is good for the heart. Many herbalists and naturopaths believe garlic is a "miracle food" because it gives flavour to dishes for very few calories, meaning you don't need as much salt. It also helps reduce blood pressure and stop the production of "bad" (LDL) cholesterol by the liver.

• Super-nutrients: Soluble fibres (that lower cholesterol), slow-release sugars (that avoid sharp rises in blood sugar).
• Serving size: 125 millilitres (1/2 cup) of oats (150 kcal).
• Benefits: Soluble beta-glucan fibres found in oats lower levels of "bad" cholesterol without reducing the levels of "good" cholesterol and raising triglyceride levels. Eating a bowl of oatmeal at breakfast every day could reduce cholesterol levels by two to three per cent. The soluble fibres also reduce blood pressure.

• Be creative: prepare classic oatmeal with skimmed milk and flavour it with honey, vanilla, cinnamon, cardamom, fresh or dried fruit and nuts.
• Thicken soups and stirfries by adding a handful of oatmeal.
• To prepare a healthy crumble, make the dough with chopped nuts, a little canola oil, oatmeal and a little brown sugar. Place chopped fruit in a baking dish, top with the dough, and bake at 180 °C for 30-45 minutes.
• In poultry stuffing, replace half the amount of bread crumbs with oatmeal. You will get a lighter stuffing, with a more pleasant texture.
• In pancake batter, replace a third of the flour with oatmeal finely ground in the blender.

• Super-nutrients: Lycopene and potassium.
• Serving size: A medium slice: about 200 grams (eight ounces) (62 kcal).
• Benefits: Although watermelon is usually synonymous with summer, today you can find it almost all year round (sometimes cubed). A slice of watermelon at 200 grams (eight ounces) contains 275 milligrams of potassium, which lowers blood pressure. Watermelon also contains a great deal of lycopene, an antioxidant whose presence in the blood reduces the risk of developing heart disease, according to various studies.

• Add diced or small watermelon balls to your fruit salad. (Buy a melon baller, which makes it very easy to make small balls of melon.)
• Freeze pieces of watermelon and blend them (with a little sugar) to make a fresh watermelon sorbet.
• Make cold skewers, alternating cold watermelon balls, cooked turkey chunks and diced low-fat cheese.
• Add pieces of watermelon to your green salads and chicken salads.

Oats, garlic and watermelon are looking out for your health. Eat them guilt-free!