"The Best Food For High Cholesterol"
Medicinal plants are said to be “nature's gift to human beings
to promote a disease-free healthy life,”
here in reference to amla, a fruit, the Indian gooseberry,
described as the Ayurvedic wonder.
You hear a lot of that larger-than-life talk
about amla coming out of Indian medical journals.
Who can forget “Amla, a wonder berry
in the treatment and prevention of cancer.”
Amla is so revered that you find serious scientists,
at serious academic institutions,
in serious peer-reviewed medical journals,
making statements like this:
“Every part of the Indian gooseberry plant
has its unique therapeutic characteristic
for the remedy of almost all the ailments
and can be adopted as a single bullet against disease.”
OK, then.
I first ran across it in this famous article,
looking at the total antioxidant content
of thousands of different foods.
I did a series of videos about it ages ago.
And, to my surprise, the #1 most antioxidant
packed single whole food on the planet,
on average, was amla:
dried powdered Indian gooseberries,
beating out the prior heavyweight champion,
cloves, with, just for comparison’s sake,
up to a hundred times or more antioxidants
by weight than blueberries.
So, here’s this fruit that has enjoyed
“a hallowed position in Ayurveda,”
the ancient system of medicine in India -
so hallowed it was mythologically pegged
as the first tree in the universe.
So, for thousands of years—before we even knew
what an antioxidant was, they were revering this plant
that just so happens to turn out to be
the most antioxidant packed fruit on the Planet Earth.
OK, you got my attention.
But, I still needed to see it put to the test.
Well, indigenous tribal healers
used amla to treat diabetes.
So, researchers decided to give it a try.
This is the study that originally bowled me over.
In fact, it was the subject
of one of my first NutritionFacts videos
of all time over 5 years ago:
the effect of amla fruit
on the blood sugars and cholesterol levels
of normal subjects and type 2 diabetic patients.
In my video, I talked about the jaw-dropping effects
of five cents worth of this powdered fruit,
five pennies worth, compared to a diabetes drug.
But, what about the cholesterol effects?
If you take healthy individuals
and give them a placebo sugar pill,
nothing much happens to their cholesterol.
Ideally, we want our total cholesterol under 150.
This was a pretty healthy group,
the average cholesterol in the U.S. is over 200,
which is where the diabetics started out in this study.
And, when you give them placebo pills,
nothing much happens either.
But, give people just about
a half teaspoon of amla powder a day—
not some extract or something, just dried Indian gooseberries,
a powdered fruit and this is what happens.
That’s like a 35-40% drop in three weeks—
absolutely astounding.
That’s the kind of thing we see
like 6 months after putting people on statin drugs.
What we care about most is LDL,
the so-called bad cholesterol,
shooting for under at least 70 ideally.
No impact of the placebos,
but again, just about a half teaspoon of amla,
which would cost you about 5 cents a day,
so like a buck fifty a month, and boom.
These results knocked my socks off.
I mean, they’re just un-believable.
That’s why I was so excited after all these years
to dig back into the amla literature
to see if these findings
had been confirmed or replicated elsewhere.
So, I typed amla into PubMed and waded through
all the papers on using amla
to decrease methane in cow farts,
and speed the growth of chickens,
or hey, what about amla ice cream?
After all, amla is packed with fiber and phytonutrients.
In contrast, ice cream is not.
Therefore…
And indeed, amla incorporated
into ice cream increases the antioxidant capacity.
though I would not recommend it
for cholesterol lowering.
Ah, but here we go.
A comparative clinical study of amla
head to head against the cholesterol-lowering statin drug
simvastatin, sold as Zocor,
which I’ll cover, next.