Hello and welcome to the Nutrition Diva Podcast. I'm Monica Reinagle.

Thanks for joining me today.

Cindy writes, recently I've been seeing ads on television saying that corn oil is better than

olive oil for lowering cholesterol. I've always used olive oil and canola oil, but now I'm thinking of changing from canola oil to corn oil, should I make the switch?

I bet Cindy's not the only one who's been seeing these ads.

Makers of corn oil are spending a lot of money right now to promote the results of a study,

which showed that a diet rich in corn oil reduced cholesterol more than a diet rich in olive oil.

Now those of you with a very good memory might remember me writing about this same study

a few years ago when the unpublished results were first presented at a scientific meeting. This month though, this the study was finally published in a

this month though the study was finally published in a peer-reviewed journal

and because it's getting a lot of new attention I thought it would be worth

revisiting.

And now let's take a closer look at what this study found and then I'll tell you whether

I think it makes sense to start using corn oil in place of other oils you might be using.

In this study, healthy adults consumed either 4 tablespoons of corn oil or 4 tablespoons of

extra virgin olive oil per day for three weeks.

And the oils were incorporated into various foods like muffins and yogurt.

After three weeks on the corn oil diet, the subject saw a 9% reduction on average in their

LDL cholesterol, and that was compared with just a 2% reduction for the olive oil diet.

Although this finding might surprise you, it was not a surprise to the researchers.

Corn oil is naturally rich in phytosterols.

These are compounds that are shaped very similarly to cholesterol and they can block the

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