This Nut Boosts Good Cholesterol While Slashing the Bad

It tastes great raw, toasted, seasoned, and smoked; it can make milk, butter, oil, and flour, and it now turns out that it can benefit your cholesterol profile too.

Researchers from Penn State University have just published a study in the Journal of Nutrition that shows how it lowers your bad cholesterol while increasing your good cholesterol.

Like that wasn’t enough, it also boosts the level of productivity at which your good cholesterol removes bad cholesterol from your bloodstream.

LDL is normally considered bad cholesterol, as it has the potential to clog your arteries. HDL, on the other hand, removes this LDL cholesterol from your body, and is therefore considered good cholesterol.

The Penn State researchers asked 24 of their 48 participants to eat a handful of almonds daily for six weeks.

The other 24 volunteers ate a similar diet for the same amount of time, but ate a banana muffin daily instead of the almonds.

After the six weeks, the scientists swapped the two groups, with the almond consumers now eating a banana muffin and vice versa.

At the beginning and end of each diet period, they measured the level and function of the 48 participants’ cholesterol.

Compared with the muffin diet, the almond diet increased HDL function by 6% and the presence of α-1 HDL by an impressive 19%.

α-1 HDL is the most important sign that your HDL cholesterol is working well to remove bad cholesterol from your body.

As HDL cholesterol particles collect LDL cholesterol from around your bloodstream to transport to your liver (from which it is processed for excretion), those HDL particles become bigger, much like a garbage bag becoming bigger as you fill it up.

The largest garbage bags, or HDL particles, are clearly the most effective at removing the garbage, or LDL cholesterol particles in this case.

α-1 HDL particles are the largest and most productive HDL particles, which is why the researchers concluded that almonds were a great tool for making your HDL cholesterol more productive.

But eating almonds is not enough to completely clear out clogged arteries. For that, you need to cut out this ONE ingredient, you didn’t even realize you were consuming…