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Saturday, July 26, 2003Jenkins and his team randomly assigned 46 men and women with high LDL cholesterol -- the so-called bad cholesterol -- to one of three vegetarian diet groups. The control group, those not on lovastatin -- a popular cholesterol-lowering drug -- or the specific diet being tested, ate meals low in saturated fats found in animal products such as beef and butter. The second group had the same low-fat diet, plus a daily 20-milligram treatment of lovastatin. The last group received a diet high in foods identified in previous clinical trials to have cholesterol-lowering properties. They include foods such as oat bran bread and cereal, soy drinks, fruit and soy deli slices and roasted almonds. A typical dinner was tofu baked with eggplant, onions and sweet peppers, pearled barley and vegetables. The investigators found the dietary approach used with the third group lowered levels of LDL cholesterol by almost 29 per cent, almost identical statistically to the 30.9 percent decrease among lovastatin users. Or, as the abstract describes it: Participants were randomly assigned to undergo 1 of 3 interventions on an outpatient basis for 1 month: a diet very low in saturated fat, based on milled whole-wheat cereals and low-fat dairy foods (n = 16; control); the same diet plus lovastatin, 20 mg/d (n = 14); or a diet high in plant sterols (1.0 g/1000 kcal), soy protein (21.4 g/1000 kcal), viscous fibers (9.8 g/1000 kcal), and almonds (14 g/1000 kcal) (n = 16; dietary portfolio). Vegetables and almonds would certainly be less expensive than our current mania for statins: As he and colleagues reported in the July 23 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Jenkins noted an estimated 1 million people in Great Britain and 6 million people in North America currently are treating high cholesterol by using statin drugs. Data published in 2003 in the journal Diabetes Care indicate the annual cost of statin therapy, medication, monitoring and adverse events is between $600 and $2,1000 per person, depending on the LDL cholesterol level being treated. Although the study is a small one, it does appear to find the same trends in cholesterol lowering for the "ape diet" and the traditional low-cholesterol diet combined with statin therapy. (For those with access to the full paper, here's a conversion table to translate the cholesterol results to the units of measurement traditionally used in the U.S.). The ape diet group started out with an average cholesterol level of 268 and brought it down to 209 in four weeks. Their bad cholesterol (LDL) went from an average of 178 to 126. The statin group, who were also following a low cholesterol diet, lowered their cholesterol from 256 to 199, and their LDL from 172 to 117. The traditional diet alone was the most disappointing. In that group total cholesterol went from 246 to 230, and their LDL from 165 to 152. None of the groups lowered their LDL cholesterol to less than 100 as is currently recommended for diabetics or people with coronary artery disease, so fruit and nuts aren't likely to supplant the current statin mania any time soon. posted by Sydney on 7/26/2003 08:23:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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