Yummy Snack Cuts Cholesterol Better Than Statins

A crazy number of people are taking statins for high cholesterol these days, but a study in the Journal of Nutrition shows that this is completely unnecessary.

It found that a snack packed with delicious cholesterol-busting foods can do an equally good job—without any side effects!

Certain foods have the ability to lower cholesterol significantly, as found by numerous studies.

Researchers from the Mayo Clinic decided to find out what would happen if subjects were given all of these foods every day.

They recruited 54 subjects (18 men and 36 women) with an average age of 49 years.

They split them into two groups.

The study was split into three 4-week periods.

They asked the first group to eat twice-daily snacks especially made for this study by Step One Foods for the first four weeks. The other group had to eat supermarket snacks with the same number of calories over this period.

Both groups then went back onto their normal diets for the following four weeks, before they switched so that the first group ate the supermarket snacks with the second group eating the carefully formulated snacks, again for four weeks.

They asked their subjects not to make any other changes to their diet or lifestyle, except to drop a bit of food equal in calories to the snacks they were now eating instead.

After the study, they found that LDL cholesterol—the bad unhealthy type—dropped by an average of 9% in just one month.

This is equivalent to the effect of relatively low doses of statins.

Spectacularly, however, cholesterol levels in some participants dropped by 30%, which is equivalent to high doses of the most powerful statins.

What did these miracle snacks contain?

Soluble fiber, plant phytosterols, antioxidants, and alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), all of which have a proven track record of reducing cholesterol.

In practice, the ingredients were things like walnuts, almonds, oats, and berries.

The snacks were yummy things like oatmeal, granola, pancakes, cranberry bars, and smoothies, all with these healthy ingredients and all fortified with plant sterols that would otherwise come from the vegetables that people don’t want to eat.

This is why the researchers think their study is so powerful. Previous studies have shown that vegan and even vegetarian diets can drop cholesterol by an average of 17%, but compliance with these diets is low, probably because people just don’t like the vegetables or because ultra-processed foods are less time-consuming.

In this study, compliance with the snacks was between 95–96.5%.

And since these snacks come with no side effects, they’re better than statins in every way.

If companies were to start making cholesterol-busting snacks that are actually tasty, people would eat them, and a health revolution could begin.

But lowering cholesterol is not enough—you also have to clear out the cholesterol buildup in your arteries. And you can do that by cutting out this ONE ingredient you didn’t even know you were consuming…