Limiting fat, sugar and alcohol in your diet can help lower triglycerides as can losing weight if you are overweight. Periodically, you need to have your cholesterol and triglyceride levels in your blood checked. If the levels are not where they should be, you may need to make changes to your diet to lower your cholesterol. Eating healthy can both lower cholesterol and prevent it from rising. Both cholesterol and fat in food can lead to high cholesterol in the blood.
Cholesterol is present only in animal products.
Fat is present in both animal and vegetable products. There are different types of fats in different foods. The different types of fat in food are saturated fat, hydrogenated fat, monounsaturated fat and polyunsaturated fat. Reading labels is important when you are trying to decrease total fat, saturated fat and cholesterol intake while trying to increase your intake of foods high in unsaturated fat. The amount of fat you need per day will depend on your calorie needs.