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To: ConservativeMind

Thanks for the information. However, I am still not going to have very much at all in the way of oats, much less 300 g for two days in a row in order to reduce my cholesterol. As I’ve said elsewhere on this thread, cholesterol is not the problem. It is a coincident indicator, because cholesterol is a significant component of arterial plaque. The purpose of arterial plaque is to effectively act like an internal Band-Aid, covering up inflamed portions of your arteries so that they can heal. Cholesterol is not the problem, inflammation that causes injury to our arteries is. That inflammation is exacerbated by a number of things, such as cigarette smoking, drinking alcohol, consumption of highly processed seed oilsand excess consumption of carbohydrates. I absolutely do not buy into the claim that statins have reduced heart disease. Oh, maybe to a very minor extent, I’ll concede that (because one of the benefits of low-dose statins is that they can reduce inflammation somewhat. But the drop in heart disease over the last 30 years has much more to do with the substantial reduction in both smoking and heavy drinking.

I have no problem with the results of this study, in the sense that I believe that their measurements are accurate. Oatmeal probably does reduce cholesterol, because it has soluble fiber that attaches to cholesterol molecules and tends to shunt it out of the body. My question/problem is with the premise, that reducing cholesterol actually improves one’s health. In some cases, it probably does. However, it does not apply to the great mass of people. There is no reason for 35% of the adult population of this country to be on statin drugs, other than to increase the bottom line of pharmaceutical companies which want anything but customers who are cured of disease. Instead, they want people who are sick for years or decades, so they can keep supplying us with expensive drugs.


95 posted on 01/28/2026 6:32:38 AM PST by Ancesthntr ("The right to buy weapons is the right to be free." The Weapons Shops of Isher)
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To: Ancesthntr

“Oatmeal probably does reduce cholesterol, because it has soluble fiber that attaches to cholesterol molecules and tends to shunt it out of the body.”


That’s the theory put out by promoters of fibers but that makes no sense. Fiber MAY attach to cholesterol but only to dietary cholesterol in the intestinal tract, not to blood cholesterol since fibers never enter the bloodstream and can’t possibly “shunt cholesterol out of the body”. But dietary cholesterol is nearly non-existent, especially in a vegan diet, the most you can find is in eggs but at just around 1% by weight (and virtually 0% in meat), so it has no direct influence on serum cholesterol.

Moreover, dietary cholesterol has no relation with serum cholesterol since the former is completely decomposed and reprocessed before reaching the bloodstream so it can’t change the level of the latter, never ever, there has not a single physiological evidence that shows it. Serum level of cholesterol in a healthy body is like pH or temperature, it is homeostatic (regulated tighly). What you eat can change it only in very long term and only via indirect mechanism like metabolic health, blood pressure, age...

Yeah, the nutrition field is chock full of misconceptions or outright lies like this (”whole grains have fibers, fibers are healthy food, fibers reduce cholesterol”). No wonder why all those who swallow them line, hook and sinker freak out with the new upside down food pyramid.


98 posted on 01/30/2026 1:44:46 PM PST by miniTAX
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