Summer fun means more time outside being active and enjoying fresh summer fruits and tasty grilled food.
It’s the perfect time to adopt a healthy lifestyle and make positive lifestyle changes. Maintaining healthy cholesterol levels is one way to keep your health in check and prevent serious health conditions like heart disease from developing.
By getting regular cholesterol testing you can detect high cholesterol early on and make the necessary lifestyle changes to improve good and bad cholesterol levels. Regular testing through home cholesterol tests or private cholesterol tests at your local Intrigue Health Pharmacy will help you monitor the treatment of your lifestyle changes so you can better control your cholesterol levels to protect your heart and prevent illness.
In this article, you will learn the value of cholesterol blood tests and how they can improve your health.
How Seasonal Behaviour Affects Cholesterol Levels
In general, people are much more active during the summer and tend to eat healthier with the availability of great summer fruits and outdoor cooking. Whereas, in winter it’s harder to work exercise into daily routines due to lack of motivation and the inconvenience of winter weather. Instead, cosying up at home with heavy and high-calorie comfort food is often the norm. Plus, the shorter days of winter lower vitamin D intake which helps control cholesterol, further increasing bad cholesterol levels.
When you consume a high-fat diet and don’t exercise regularly this can adversely affect your cholesterol, resulting in high LDL (bad) cholesterol which can thicken the lining of the arteries. Over time, if high cholesterol is left untreated, it can lead to heart disease, stroke, and heart attack.
Summer can help to improve cholesterol levels as diet and activity improve over the warmer months, thus displaying a positive balance of lipid levels and higher levels of triglyceride and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) good cholesterol.
When you reduce the risk of high cholesterol levels, this helps to prevent heart disease and controls blood pressure too. Winter weather does not directly affect cholesterol levels, but your behaviour in winter does. However, if you continue to maintain a healthy diet and exercise year-round, then you can keep your cholesterol levels in check.
Click here to get more information about the different blood tests we offer as well as our services at our Intrigue Health pharmacies in South London. In addition to Private Blood Testing, we also carry NHS-approved Cholesterol Test Kits for convenient home testing. You can also book a cholesterol test online with a few steps.
