Hello everybody I'm Monica Reinagle the nutrition diva here with your quick and dirty

tips for eating well and feeling fabulous.

Nutrition diva listener, AAN, writes,

I recently heard about a study that found that drinking red wine while eating red meat

will stop cholesterol from staying in the body.

Is there any truth to this?

Well there is some truth to this rumor Ann.

A study published earlier this year in the Journal of Functional Foods found that combining red wine with meat blocks the formation of a compound that's thought to be involved in the formation of LDL or bad cholesterol in the to the public, an awful lot got lost in translation. Many of the headlines, for example,

touted the benefits of drinking red wine with red meat or steak, but the meat used in the study

was actually ground turkey.

Why? Because ground turkey is quite a bit higher in polyuns

saturated fats than beef.

During digestion, these polyunsaturated fats tend to become oxidized,

giving rise to compounds that interact with cholesterol in a way that makes it more dangerous.

Now I want to pause before I go any further because what I just said may have surprised you.

We're used to hearing that saturated fat is the bad guy linked to high cholesterol and heart disease.

In fact, many people would assume that a turkey burger

which is lower in saturated fat and higher in polyunsaturated fat would be more

heart healthy than a steak and yet these researchers chose turkey over beef

because of its propensity to produce these cholesterol damaging compounds.

In any case, in this study,

they took 14 healthy volunteers and they had them eat a turkey

...