HELEN BRANSWELL
Canadian Press

Monday, December 02, 2002

TORONTO (CP) - A special vegetarian diet could be as effective as drugs in lowering bad cholesterol, a new study suggests.

The diet, composed of a variety of foods each known to be moderately effective in combating cholesterol levels, cut bad cholesterol by close to 30 per cent among study participants. That's within the range of improvement generally seen when a person takes a statin drug to lower cholesterol, said lead author Dr. David Jenkins.

"We thought that by bundling these together, we might get something approaching that. Or, we felt they may cancel out, in which case we just get what we were left with in the beginning. That was our concern," said Jenkins, who holds the Canada research chair in nutrition and metabolism at the University of Toronto.

"And to our delight . . . we found that they did stack up, one on top of the other."

The study, released Sunday, was published in the December issue of the journal Metabolism.

Jenkins is the nutrition expert who reported that if people ate like their cave-dwelling ancestors, cholesterol problems would disappear.

However, when his Garden of Eden diet study was published in April 2001, he admitted the sheer bulk of the fruits, nuts, seeds and leafy vegetables the diet comprised made eating a full-time job.

At the time, Jenkins said the take-home message was straightforward, if pessimistic: With the modern diet, pressed schedules and sedentary lifestyles, most people will eventually need to be on cholesterol-lowering drugs.

But the findings got Jenkins and his colleagues to thinking about the evolution of the human diet and the rapid changes in it that have resulted from the technological advances of the 20th century.

"We concluded that the sort of components that had been in the human diet for a long time really ought to be reintroduced in some fashion," said Jenkins, who is also director of the clinical nutrition and risk factor modification clinic at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto.

That means nuts. Viscous fibres such as those found in oats and barley. Plant sterols, a substance found in vegetable oils and in leafy green and non-starchy vegetables. Foods rich in soy proteins. Each of those alone, in sufficient quantities, has the ability to lower bad cholesterol levels by between four to seven per cent.

Together they lowered low density lipoprotein levels - the so-called bad cholesterol - by an average of 29 per cent in one month. The researchers studied 13 subjects, male and female, who ranged in age from 43 to 84.

As with all this team's studies, subjects were provided with pre-measured quantities of foods and were told what to eat and when.

A typical breakfast might include soy milk, oat bran cereal topped with chopped fruit and almonds and oatmeal bread with vegetable margarine and jam. Lunch might be soy cold cuts, oat bran bread, bean soup and fruit. Dinner might be stir-fried vegetables with tofu, fruit and almonds.

Some of the participants took to the diet "like ducks into water," Jenkins said. Others found it bland and restrictive.

All found the diet excessively filling and had a hard time maintaining their starting body weight. (The researchers strive to ensure subjects don't lose weight during these studies as that would make it difficult to determine what caused the cholesterol change, the diet or the weight loss.)

Efforts are continuing to refine a diet that will be both effective in lowering cholesterol and sustainable outside of the laboratory. Still, for some of the participants in this latest study, this diet is it.

"We've had about four or five people who have, after the first study, carried on. And the mark of it is they've kept their cholesterol levels if not as low as they were on the actual diet, still much, much lower," Jenkins said.

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Those ancestors ate meat!

Sheldon