And I wish the article stated just how much red onion these hamsters were fed. The change in LDL could have been just because of an increase in fiber from the onions, if they were fed a lot of them.
"Onions have long been known to have many health benefits including preventing cancer, heart disease and common coughs and colds. It has been found that some parts of the world where onion consumption is high have even been shown to have much lower cancer rates.
"For example in Georgia, in the US, where the small, sweet Videlia onion is grown the number of stomach cancer diagnoses are a half the average for the rest of the country. In China, where people eat more onions and garlic than anywhere else in the world, the risk of stomach cancer is 40% lower than average. " The hamsters were fed "crushed" red onion --- presumably raw --- but the people cited above, I would assume, ate the onion both in raw and cooked form.
Onions supposedly have a lot of a fructo-oligosaccharides (FOS), which are extremely effective in feeding and multiplying your friendly gut microorganisms. (They say a pre-biotic like FOS is even better for this purpose than a pro-biotic like yogurt.)
Western Yellow, New York Bold, and Northern Red onions have the richest concentration of flavonoids and phenolics, providing them with the greatest antioxidant and anti-proliferative activity of 10 onions tested.