In the study, which was published in the July 23 2003 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers divided participants into three diet groups. One group ate a diet low in saturated fat, the second group received the same diet, along with a statin, and the third group ate a diet containing specific cholesterol-lowering foods. Below, lead researcher Cyril Kendall, PhD, a research associate in the department of nutritional science at the University of Toronto, discusses how diet can quickly and safely reduce cholesterol levels, and whether people can learn to stick with it.
Why did you and your colleagues decide to conduct this study?
There are a number of reasons. Obviously, heart disease is the number-one killer in North America. I think there's been a growing trend to treat the disease with drug therapy, and there is nothing wrong with this. The drugs are quite effective and work well, but if you look at the American Heart Association guidelines and the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) guidelines, the first strategy for primary prevention of the disease is diet and other lifestyle modification.
We had some interest in looking at the evolution of the human diet. The thinking was that for much of our evolutionary development over the last 10 or 15 million years, we would have been predominantly vegetarian. And if you look at the great apes living presently, they are, for the most part, eating a vegetarian diet. So genetically we're designed for basically a fruit, nut and vegetable diet.
This led to a study that we conducted about three or four years ago looking at that sort of diet, a simian diet. We had about a 35 percent reduction in LDL cholesterol. So we knew the diet could achieve a much greater reduction than that which was generally recognized by health professionals.
