[Long known and mostly unused: lifestyle measures to support lipid-lowering therapy]

Dyslipidemias are common metabolic disorders in Western industrialized countries. Lifestyle measures such as increasing physical activity and improving diet were for many years the only measure for their treatment. Because of their health-promoting effects, guidelines for the treatment of dyslipidemias consider lifestyle measures to be the basis of any drug therapy. Due to the numerous efficient options for intensive lipid-lowering medication, lifestyle measures are recommended by responsible physicians, but their implementation is usually not intensively pursued due to the large time commitment; in contrast to sustained recommendations for increasing physical activity and normalizing body weight, nutritional therapists are too rarely consulted as specialists despite the significant effects our diet has on cardiovascular risk factors such as LDL-cholesterol, triglycerides and blood pressure. In this review, the principles of nutritional therapy of dyslipidemias are described, and it is outlined how recent studies support the plausibility and evidence of the individual measures.