Get Juiced!

People looking to protect their hearts have a refreshing new dietary option. Until now, researchers have only been able to add cholesterol-lowering sterols to fat-based products like margarine—not the type of food you want to load up on. But they’ve just figured out how to put sterols in orange juice, too. The product is now on the market as Minute Maid Premium Heart Wise juice.

And new research suggests it does the trick. In a study of 72 people with moderately elevated cholesterol levels, those who drank two glasses a day of the sterol-fortified juice cut their total cholesterol by 7 percent and their LDL, or bad cholesterol, by 12 percent. That may not sound like a lot, but according to authors Sridevi Devaraj and Ishwarlal Jialal of the University of California, Davis Medical Center, it’s definitely enough to reduce a person’s risk of heart attack.

Enter a comment related to this article

---