Eating two “doses” a day of specially formulated snacks with ingredients such as walnuts, oats and berries can lower your levels of bad cholesterol, in some cases producing an effect comparable with statins, a study has showed.
Researchers at the Mayo Clinic, in Minnesota, found that replacing two of your usual daily snacks with ones containing the right levels of fibre, fatty acids, antioxidants and phytosterols, found in plant cell membranes, can reduce levels of bad cholesterol by an average of 9 per cent in one month.
The effect is smaller than that typically seen with statins. Pravastatin, a commonly used statin in the UK, would reduce low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol by about 27 per cent, according to Dr Stephen Kopecky, lead author of the