Plants do have cholesterol

Cholesterol and Plants
E. J. Behrman and Venkat Gopalan
Department of Biochemistry, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210-1292

snip…

There is a widespread belief among the public and even among chemists that plants do not contain cholesterol.

This error is the result (in part) of the fact that plants generally contain only small quantities of cholesterol and that analytical methods for the detection of cholesterol in this range were not well developed until recently (1).

Another reason has to do with the legalities of food labeling that allow small quantities of cholesterol in foods to be called zero (2).

The fact is that cholesterol is widespread in the plant kingdom although other related sterols, such as β-sitosterol (henceforth referred to as sitosterol), generally occur in larger quantities.

snip …

Source                 Cholesterol/(mg/kg-1)    Reference
Palm oil                20                      14
Palm oil                16                      1
Palm kernel             17                      1
Coconut oil             14                      1
Cottonseed oil          45                      1
Soybean oil             29                      1
Corn oil                55                      1
Peanut oil              24                      1
Sunflower seed oil      14                      1
Canola oil              53                      1
Avocado oil             <30                     15
Olive oil               0.5–2                   16,17
Sesame oil              ca. 1                   16,17

snip….

According to FDA rules,
cholesterol quantities less than 2 mgserving may be labeled
as zero (19).

Before you back on the Atkins Diet notice that the units in the chart above are for milligrams per pound of oil. To put those figures into perspective a large egg has about 211 milligrams of cholesterol.

Bottles

The New York Times had an interesting  article about how reusing disposable plastic bottles can be bad for your health. Basically, crap comes out of the plastic and goes into your body.

Top points that the article made:

  1. Reusable beverage containers are friendly to both the environment and your health.
  2. Stainless steel and glass are your best choices
  3. If you are worried about breaking glass or losing expensive stainless steel containers Number 2 or Number 5 plastic containers are the next best alternative
  4. If you reuse any kind of plastic don’t put the containers in your dish washer and don’t use strong detergents to wash them. That will contribute to the plastic breaking down and putting crap into your body

Dr. Barnard’s Diabetes Book

I won this book as part of a health package at a silent auction at a fund raising party for a local animal protection group.


Dr. Neal Barnard’s Program For Reversing Diabetes – The scientifically proven system for reversing diabetes without drugs
by
Dr. Neal Barnard M.D.
ISBN-13 978-1-59486-528-2

I don’t have diabetes, but I found this book to be very interesting..

One current theory for the genesis of food allergies is that “leaky guts”, porous intestines leak out proteins from our food before those proteins have been broken down into amino acids. These proteins then get out into the blood where the immune system is alerted to them, thus triggering an autoimmune response.

Infants, whose digestive systems are not fully matured, are predisposed to having leaky intestines. They are vulnerable to developing food allergies if they are fed highly allergenic foods too early ( dairy products, soy, wheat, citrus, meat etc ). The proteins leak into their blood stream and their immune systems are inadvertently trained to see these proteins as hazards.

Type 1 diabetes is believed to happen, in part, when the immune system mistakenly attacks and destroys the insulin producing cells of the pancreas ( pages 30 – 35 ). The book describes several studies of children predisposed to type 1 diabetes or children who were on their way to getting it. It turned out that these children’s immune systems were “on alert” to attacking proteins found in bovine milk. It has been discovered that portions of those bovine milk proteins were nearly biochemically identical to the children’s insulin producing cells.

Wow.

Dr. Barnard’s dietary program for type 2 diabetes has been tested in several studies in partnership with the National Institute Of Health. In a nutshell, he prescribes eating low fat ( only 20% of calories from fat, preferably 10% ), high fiber, low glycemic index valued, and vegan foods. That is, each bit of food that a recovering diabetic eats has all of these qualities.

The really interesting part is where the book explains why this works. Too much fat accumulating on the inside of cells causes the mitochondria in those cells to stop burning such fat, which leads to insulin resistance. Though a person’s pancreas might be kicking out enough insulin, the insulin no longer has any effect on the cells. The cells will not absorb glucose from the blood stream leading to toxic levels of sugar in the blood.

The diet described above has been proven to reduce the amount of fat within cells, restart the burning of this fat by the mitochonria, reverse insulin resistance, and lower blood sugar levels — without drugs.

Again, wow.

Weight control is an important part of treating diabetes and this book has a lot of interesting facts about losing weight from the studies of Dr. Barbara Rolls who wrote the book “Volumetrics”. Unlike the various quack popular diet book authors out there Dr. Rolls is a highly respected scientist who has been researching how to satisfy hunger with fewer calories.

One thing she learned is that for each 14 gram increase of fiber in a diet ( via food, not supplements ) people will eat until they are full, but they will feel full on 200 fewer calories.
200 fewer calories per day is enough to lose 20 pounds over the course of a year.

Her theory is that weight in the stomach triggers satiation.

Interestingly, her studies found that not any weight will set this response off. Having study participants drink a particular weight of water did nothing for triggering early satiation. However taking in the same weight composed of water and food ( stew ) did.

Dr. Rolls recommends eating foods that have natural “bulk” – a lot of water and a lot of fiber together naturally. To encourage weight loss she advises eating food that has the more weight per a particular amount of calories.

A neat trick offered by the book is to focus on eating foods that have an equal number of calories as grams of weight…or less.

Another simple weight loss trick offered by Dr. Barnard is to do a “quick fiber check” when your weight loss seems to be slowing down. He has a set value of points for servings of legumes, vegetables, fruit, and whole grains. You count the number of servings of each you have every day. If your points add up to less than 40 and you want more weight loss you eat more food from those groups of foods.

The book also gave a very clear introduction to the disease of diabetes in accessible, but not dumbed down language that I found fascinating.

I am really glad I won this book. I enjoyed reading it very much.