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EASY DOES IT

Just don’t overdo it, warns Dr. Blackburn. More fiber is not necessarily better, and too much can cause stomach upset, gas and diarrhea.
And what if you have no reason to assume you’re among the unlucky one in five American men with a cholesterol level in the risky zones above 200?
“I’d recommend taking psyllium anyway, “says Larry Bell, M.D., of the University of Minnesota, whose psyllium research appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “Whether it lowers your cholesterol or not, many health groups recommend that we get more fiber in our diets.”
Remember, the longer your cholesterol stays elevated, the greater your danger of heart disease. A diet that’s low in fat and high in soluble fiber, including phyllium, is a wayto eat smart and protect your heart.

Posted 28 August 2009 † admin § Better Thing to do ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

JUST WHAT THE DOCTOR ORDERED

All of which seem to be just what the doctors are ordering. “We encourage people to use psyllium in addition to changing their diet,” says Donald Smith, M.D., lipids and metabolism researcher at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. “Soluble fiber really does reduce the harmful form of cholesterol, whether you get the fiber from fruits, vegetables, beans, grains or phyllium.”
Psyllium may also help you lose weight, according to George Blackburn, M.D., Ph.D., chief of the Nutrition/Metabolism Laboratory at New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston. High-fiber foods take longer to digest, so your stomach feels full longer and you eat less.
Just don’t take that as license to eat anything you want as long as you follow it with a few teaspoons of fiber. “There’s a rumor going around that you can lose weight on ice cream and candy bars as long as you send them down the hatch with some fiber,: says Dr. Blackburn. “The claim is that the fiber will escort a large portion of the calories out the back door. That’s a wild exaggeration.”
When you’re ready to lower your cholesterol, the first step is to switch to a low-fat diet and to include some oat bran in our meals. Then says Peter Kwiterovich, Jr., M.D., author of Beyond cholesterol: The Johns Hopkins Complete Guide for Avoiding Heart Disease, if your cholesterol level is still borderline high (200 to 240) or high (over 240) ask your doctor if you should be taking one teaspoon of powdered psyllium three times a day to achieve and additional reduction. Metamucil is probably the best-known psyllium product, but there are dozens of brands of psyllium in powdered and tablet form at pharmacies and health-food stores. Dr. Smith of Mount Sinai recommends stirring powdered psyllium into an eight-ounce glass of water before meals.
If you begin your by with a high-fiber breakfast ( a one ounce serving of Kellogg’s Heartwise cereal, which contains psyllium, gives you close to a teaspoon of soluble fiber), you can skip your morning teaspoon of psyllium and take only two teaspoons later.

Posted 27 August 2009 † admin § Better Thing to do ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

It’s the Better Thing to Do

Oat bran may get all the press coverage, but psyllium is the superstar when it comes to lowering your cholesterol.
GET ME HOLLYWOOD. Time for Mary Poppins II. We get Julie Andrews. She signs. But forget that spoonful of sugar stuff. Times change. This time it’s: “A spoonful of psyllium helps the cholesterol go down…” Think of the commercial tieins. Memo to Madison Avenu: We’ll blow Wilford Brimley right off the tube…
Okay, so we’re making lowering cholesterol sound suspiciously easy. But we figure anything worth doing is worth doing the easy way, and besides, this phyllium stuf really seems to work.
Oat bran and psyllium are both sources of soluble fiber, which helps lower cholesterol. Lately, studies have questioned whether oat bran’s effect comes from the fiber itself, or from the fact that an oat-bran muffin simply fills you up, making you less likely to tackle an Egg McMuffin afterward. Either way, pshllium is a much better source of soluble fiber than oat bran.
Psyllium is a grain that is grown in India and the Mediterranean, and it happens to be nature’s all-time greatest source of soluble fiber. It takes about eight teaspoons of oat bran (or about 1½ bowls of oatmeal) to match the amount of soluble fiber in a single teaspoon of psyllium. Of course, if you’re a label reader, none of this is news to you; psyllium is used in bulk-forming laxatives (such as Metamucil and Fiberall), and recently it’s been added to some breakfast cereals.

Posted 26 August 2009 † admin § Better Thing to do ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: