Nutrition: Soy Burgers That Keep the Beef
By JOHN O'NEIL
NYTimes

Meet a new cholesterol fighter: beef. Unlikely as that sounds, researchers found in a study released last week that adding soy to lean ground beef turned it into a cholesterol-reducing substance.

The study, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, involved feeding 34 college students with moderately elevated cholesterol levels a lunch of ground beef every day for a month.

Half of the students ate just lean ground beef; the others were given lean ground beef in which 3 percent of the meat was replaced by sterols, a component of soy known to reduce cholesterol. The soy group's cholesterol levels fell by an average of about 10 percent, while the beef-only group's levels did not change, according to the study, which was financed in part by Conagra, the agricultural giant that is one of the nation's largest producers of soybeans.

Dr. Douglas S. Lewis, the paper's senior author, said the soy-fortified beef contained less fat than commercially available margarine spreads that are fortified with sterols. The approach is also more in keeping with the dietary preferences of young American men, he said. "What I am trying to do is to make foods that people eat habitually healthier for them," he said. "I joke about what we did in our experiment as vegetabalizing the omnivore diet."


http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/25/h....html?tntemail0