Whole Foods Prove Better for Cholesterol in Low-Fat Diets

Eating a low-fat diet packed with vegetables, fruit, beans and whole grains reduces levels of "bad" cholesterol twice as much as eating a low-fat diet that's heavy on processed foods, a small study has found.

Researchers said it suggests that -- at least in the short term -- there's more to healthy eating than counting fat grams and more to controlling cholesterol than taking drugs.

"The effect of diet on lowering cholesterol has been really minimized and undermined by a lot of clinicians and researchers saying, 'Yes, it has an effect but it's really trivial. It would be better to put you on drugs to control your cholesterol,'" said Christopher Gardner, lead author of the study in a recent issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. He is director of nutrition studies at Stanford University's Prevention Research Center.

The study involved 120 adults and lasted four weeks. The group was divided in half and put on two different low-fat, weight-maintenance diets that had identical total fat, saturated fat, protein, carbohydrate and cholesterol content. The volunteers were not allowed to change their usual amount of exercise and their weight stayed the same.

Half the test group followed a diet with large quantities of plant-based foods -- vegetables, fruits, legumes, soy and whole grains -- and limited amounts of meat and dairy.

The other half followed a diet that included packaged foods like reduced-fat cheeses, lunch meat, frozen dinners, diet soda and fat-free cookies. Researchers described it as a more typical low-fat diet for U.S. consumers.

After a month, the plant-based diet group's bad cholesterol dropped 9.4 percent, compared to the prepared-foods diet group's reductions of about 4.6 percent.