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...that prescription proved too simplistic. Some people's cholesterol levels stayed high, no matter what they ate. And a lot of heart-disease patients had normal cholesterol levels. How could this be? Only recently have some of the reasons begun to emerge. For one thing, how much cholesterol you eat doesn't necessarily determine how much ends up in your blood. The body, it turns out, also manufactures its own cholesterol. And some people's bodies are just less efficient at vacuuming up excess cholesterol than others, for reasons that are largely genetic...
Doctors then began recommending foods and activities that drive down LDL and triglycerides (eat less meat, cream and butter--one recommendation that has never changed--add olive oil and fish to the diet) and at the same time push up HDL (get more exercise and lose weight...
...work but perhaps not because they're low fat; the key may be the types of foods--beans, grains, vegetables, instead of meats and cheeses--that Ornish recommends. Indeed, Mediterranean men, who get more than 30% of their calories from fat (some three times what Ornish suggests) but who eat little saturated fat, have a very low rate of heart disease...
...which started out as a good thing to eat and then became a bad thing, now turns out to be a collection of very different things, some good, some bad, some absolutely neutral. It's a pattern that has been repeated for a variety of cardiovascular risk factors. It's not pretty; the tortuous progress of scientific discovery rarely...
Fortunately, nature has also created chemicals known as antioxidants, which can prevent dangerous oxidation from happening in the first place. Among the most powerful of these is vitamin E, which is found in vegetable oils and nuts. In 1996 a major study of postmenopausal women showed that those who eat a diet rich in vitamin E had a 62% lower than average risk of dying from heart disease...