Thanks Judy for introducing the web site.Swift exercize and walking are not for me due to age and several surgeries.I found that leek, raw yellow and white onions help increasing HDL.Sun flower seeds are also helpful.I intend to introduce these things for three months and go for blood work to see if there is any change took lpace in HDL.

Eliminating Trans Fats from your diet will improve your HDL. Don't just depend on the "big print" on packaging that states 0 trans fats. Read the fine print and look for partially and fully hydrogenated fats and oils. Also watch out for Interestified fats. These are the newest modified fats the processed food industry is using to replace the old trans fats. The FDA allows food companies to claim zero trans fats, if the product contains 1/2 gm. or less per serving. So if you eat 2 servings of something that claims O trans. fat, you can easily be getting 1 gram of the very stuff you are trying to avoid. Your best bet is to avoid processed foods and fast foods as much as you can. After cutting trans fats from my diet, my HDL went up, my LDL went down and I've felt wonderful. I very seldom catch the various bugs that go 'round the work place, and if I do, they don't hit me as hard or last as long as they do my co-workers.

Supposedly the French have less problems with cholesterol because they use so much onion and garlic in their cooking. Their use of red wine is also supposed to be part of the picture. Moderate consumption of red wine can have health benefit.

One of my co-workers believes her heart to be unhealthy, and so has been consuming large amounts of raw garlic and onions. People complained to management because the woman exuded strong garlic odor, up to three feet away. Management asked her to decrease her use of raw garlic.

I used to know an elderly woman who was advised by a homeopathic doctor to consume several cloves of poached garlic per day. I cannot remember whether she simmered her garlic for seven, or nine, minutes. I never noticed a garlic odor when I visited with her.

FDA has a web site giving some info. about trans fat.I found it will be useful to post it here.
www.fda.gov/FDAC/features/2003/503_fats.html

Turmeric / curcumin is one way of raising HDL. Trials in humans show a 10-20% increase in HDL when taking 500 mg curcumin a day.

Consuming nuts every day is another way. Pistachios can increase HDL to a lesser extent than curcumin.

I improved both my blood pressure and cholesterol by cooking with sesame oil.

You might want to check out Shrubmed - it has a page that cross-references the research on herbs and natural therapies with HDL. (http://www.shrubmed.com/HDL.html or link at bottom of post). Shrubmed is basically a index to the research on herbs, and doesn't mean that all of the herbs listed are good for HDL. It just means that these herbs occur in the same abstract as HDL. But it is good for a starting point of doing research.

Here is a link that might be useful: Shrubmed Herbal Research