Side effects of cholesterol meds and osteoporosis meds are bad for me. Any other opinions?
If you have high cholesterol I would suggest a vegetarian diet. No meat, no eggs, no cheese or high fat yogurt and cream cheese. Lots of grain, greens and soy products.
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Q. I read recently in a magazine that soy products reduce cholesterol. Is this true? I am taking a medication for high cholesterol and would like to stop.
A. Soy is the most recent addition to the expanding list of dietary ammunition--oat bran, garlic, alcohol, olive oil--that MAY, under certain circumstances, lower artery clogging LDL-cholesterol. The soy connection comes from a study--actually an analysis of 38 separate investigations--published last August in the New England Journal of Medicine. This analysis concluded that people who ate 47 grams of soy protein a day reduced their LDL-cholesterol by 13%.
But as with other "magic bullets", soy falls well short of a direct hit. Although people with very high LDL-cholesterol levels (over 335 mg/dl) showed declines of up to 20% in some of these studies, individuals with levels below 260 mg/dl did not change significantly (normal is 200 mg/dl or less).
In addition, you really have to love soy for it to make a difference--47 grams of soy protein a day is a lot. To get this much, for example, you would have to eat about three soy burgers, a pound of tofu, and drink 4 cups of soy milk--or consume equivalent amounts of soy flour and grits, tempeh, soybean protein concentrates, soy butter, or soy oil. (By the way, soy sauce won't help since it contains very little soy.)
All this does not mean that soy isn't nutritious--it certainly is. Soybeans contain more protein than beef, more calcium than milk, and a wealth of minerals, vitamins and amino acids.
Still, consuming soy products (or other specific foods) is not a solution to high cholesterol. The answer to this problem lies in maintaining optimum weight, decreasing saturated fat intake, exercising regularly, and taking medications as prescribed.
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