Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.

Today we're discussing how the food we eat can lower cholesterol.

It's an important question as high cholesterol can increase our chances of developing heart disease.

Did you know that around half of adults have high cholesterol?

And it gets more common as you age.

So how can we break this trend?

Today's guest, Professor Sarah Berry,

has led more than 30 human studies on cardiometabolic health.

It's safe to say she knows a thing or two about heart health at cholesterol.

So the best way to illustrate just how effective food and our diet can be at low in cholesterol

comes from the portfolio studies. And these are key nutrition science experiments showing the power of food in relation to our health.

And the concept of the portfolio diet isn't very straightforward. What you do is replace certain

foods in your diet with other foods and ingredients that have been shown to lower cholesterol.

And it's centred around four key elements. It's centered around soy protein, plant sterols, tree nuts and soluble fiber.

And did it work?

Absolutely. So it was shown to reduce cholesterol by 30%. Now, this is similar to the level of reduction that we see in cholesterol lowering from medication like statins.

So 30%. That sounds pretty incredible. So does Zoe recommend

this diet to people with high cholesterol? So it is an incredible dietary pattern to follow,

but there's a catch with a portfolio diet that it's really difficult to follow. So it's therefore

more of a science experiment showing us what actually is the potential of food

in terms of lowering cholesterol rather than something that's really practical, I think,

in the long term. Now, I think there's a more realistic dietary pattern that's also been

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