Diet alone reduces cholesterol enough to get off statins: study

A diet based around plants, nuts and high-fiber grains lowered "bad" cholesterol more than a low-saturated-fat diet that was also vegetarian. The drop in LDL cholesterol was big enough that dietary changes could be an alternative to statin medications for many people.

One in four adults age 45 and older in the U.S. takes the cholesterol-lowering drugs. Researchers wanted to see how big an effect a diet based on the pillars of lower cholesterol could have on LDL numbers without statins. They randomly split subjects with high cholesterol into three groups. One group got nutrition counseling promoting a low-saturated-fat diet for six months. In the other two groups, dietitians helped participants fit more cholesterol-lowering foods, including soy milk, tofu, nuts, oats, peas and beans, into a healthy diet -- meeting with some of them twice during the study, and with others seven times.

After six months, people on the low-saturated-fat diet saw a drop in LDL cholesterol of 8 milligrams per deciliter on average, according to findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association. That compared to 24 mg and 26 mg decreases in participants on the cholesterol-lowering diets.

Volunteers in the cholesterol-lowering group were encouraged to consume about a gram of plant sterols in an enriched margarine per 1,000 calories of food they ate, as well as about 10 grams of fiber in the form of oats, barley and psyllium, 22.5 grams of soy protein and 22.5 grams of nuts, per 1,000 calories.

A lot of people rely on the medication, but diet is really powerful actually," said the researchers. "People ignore that. They think if they're on statins, they can do anything they want, they can eat the high-fat foods because the statins are going to take care of that." The researchers had everyone in the study who was taking statins go off the medication for the diet intervention.

Bonnie - a healthy diet with the help form a dietitian nutritionist can lower cholesterol. Shocking!