How do you reduce your cholesterol?

Making changes to your diet and taking medications prescribed by your physician can bring your cholesterol level down, according to Mayo Clinic and Harvard Medical School. The good news is that, while it's easy to elevate cholesterol through diet, it's also fairly easy to improve the levels through diet.

Choose foods with soluble fiber, polyunsaturated fats, and plants stanols and sterols to start reducing your cholesterol level. Foods such as okra, eggplant, beans, oats and citrus fruits all are high in soluble fiber, which binds to cholesterol inside the digestive tract and moves it through the system before it can enter the bloodstream. Foods such as fatty fish have polyunsaturated fats and help reduce LDL, or bad, cholesterol levels. Polyunsaturated fats don't deliver LDL cholesterol like saturated fats do, and the omega-3 fatty acids inside fatty fish lower triglyceride levels in the bloodstream, explains Harvard Medical School.

Plant stanols and sterols are available as supplements and hinder the absorption of cholesterol. Other types of pills that help reduce cholesterol include statins, bile acid-binding resins, cholesterol absorption inhibitors, fibrates and niacin. While each of these has some potentially uncomfortable side effects, they also work to lower cholesterol, accelerating the work that dietary changes are accomplishing, reports Mayo Clinic.