UK Food Standards Agency shows its ignorance

Part Part 4: Plants may be a danger

Because cholesterol is found only in animal products, more and more people have turned away from meat and towards eating foods from plants. But chole-sterol is only one of a whole family of sterols. Cholesterol is found only in animals; the other sterols are found in plants. Dr J. Plat and colleagues at Maastricht University’s Department of Human Biology in the Netherlands, say that these plant sterols may actually be more important in heart disease than cholesterol. Because plant sterols are structurally related to cholesterol, Plat and colleagues examined whether oxidized plant sterols (oxyphytosterols) could be identified in human blood and soy-based fat emulsions. They could. Approximately 1.4% of the plant sterol, sitosterol, in blood was oxidized. This may not seem very much, but it is 140 times as much as the 0.01% oxidatively modified cholesterol normally seen in human blood. The same was also found in two soy emulsions.[16]

Latest research on both humans and animals suggests that ‘functional foods’ aimed at lowering cholesterol may actually increase the risk of a heart attack.[17]

If any sterols are to blame, plant sterols are much more likely candidates than cholesterol because the popular idea that animal products, specifically protein, cholesterol, and saturated fatty acids, somehow factor in causing atherosclerosis, stroke or heart disease is not supported by any available data, including from research in the field of lipid biochemistry.[18]

On this point, it is interesting that Dr Ancel Keys, whose 1953 hypothesis began the fatty-diet-causes-heart-disease dogma did not recommend cutting down on animal fats. He recommended cutting vegetable oils.

This may be why, in a 10-year study of fats and the numbers of heart events, researchers found that only polyunsaturated fats significantly increased heart disease.[19]

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