Is Meat Good or Bad For Cholesterol? (Surprise, Surprise)

If you have heard that vegan and Mediterranean diets are heart healthy but have been incapable (or unwilling) of eliminated red meat from your diet, you will love a new study that was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Scientists from the Purdue University and the University of Texas Medical Branch accepted that the Mediterranean diet had great cardiovascular benefits, but wondered whether red meat really spoiled these benefits.

They decided to test the theory by putting 41 overweight or moderately obese volunteers through a series of diets.

They first ate a Mediterranean diet that contained 500 grams of lean, unprocessed red meat per week, for five weeks. This was supposed to be the amount of meat the typical American consumes weekly (around three ounces per day).

They then returned to their normal eating patterns for five weeks.

Lastly, they returned to the Mediterranean diet for five weeks, but this time with only 200 grams of meat per week (three ounces twice a week). This is closer to what the Mediterranean diet actually looks like.

While they were on the Mediterranean diet, including both the meaty and low-meat variants, they experienced an improvement in blood pressure and LDL cholesterol, while their HDL cholesterol, glucose, and insulin remaining unchanged.

This meant that the Mediterranean diet was healthy, and that the amount of meat consumed with it will not ruin the benefits you receive from this healthy diet.

The researchers were impressed to see that the heart benefits could be seen after only five weeks of healthy dieting, and they expected that glucose and insulin levels in the subjects would also have responded positively if the participants had remained on the diet for a longer period.

Now, just so you know, both Beef and Pork Checkoffs funded this study, which might disqualify the results a little.

However, if you want to normalize your cholesterol completely, you must cut out this one ingredient (that you did not even know you’re consuming)– as explained here…