If you believe what you read in the cereal aisle, the right breakfast choice can lower your cholesterol — and cut your risk of heart disease.
For the last few years, Cheerios boxes and ads have promoted the cereal's ability to help lower cholesterol; last year, for a time, ads promised that the cereal could lower cholesterol by a very specific 4 percent in six weeks. (Cereal maker General Mills removed that particular claim from boxes after receiving a warning letter from the Food and Drug Administration in May stating that the claim had not been approved by the agency.) A few other products, including Quaker Oatmeal Squares and Kashi Heart to Heart, claim to help lower cholesterol too.
Those claims are based on the fact that the cereals are made from whole grain oats and oat bran, sources of a type of soluble fiber called oat beta-glucan, which has been linked to reduced levels of LDL, or bad, cholesterol.
But this doesn't mean your breakfast cereal can replace your Lipitor — or take the place of the broader dietary changes necessary to lower cholesterol.
You'd have to eat a lot to benefit
The soluble fiber in some breakfast cereals can help lower cholesterol levels, but it would likely take more than a single bowl in the morning to get the desired effect, says Dr. Leslie Cho, director of the Cleveland Clinic's Women's Cardiovascular Center, in Cleveland.
It takes at least 3 grams of soluble fiber per day to reduce cholesterol, Cho says. To get that amount from a breakfast cereal, one would generally have to consume 3 cups — that's three servings — a day.
"That's a lot of soluble fiber, but it comes at a cost of lots of sugar," says Cho. Regular Cheerios provides 1 gram of soluble fiber and 1 gram of sugar per serving; Honey Nut Cheerios provides less than 1 gram of soluble fiber and 9 grams of sugar. (Sugar takes its own toll on heart health by contributing to weight gain and increasing the risk of diabetes, Cho says.)
Further, other foods are richer sources of soluble fiber. A half-cup of oatmeal provides 2 grams of the fiber, an orange provides 1.7 grams and a serving of black beans provides 2.4 grams.
Fiber is generally divided into two types. Insoluble fiber, found in whole wheat, nuts and vegetables, resists digestion and helps prevent constipation. Soluble fiber, found in oats, beans and legumes, is dissolvable in water and in recent decades has been linked to lower cholesterol levels and a reduced risk of heart disease.
A review of the evidence on soluble fiber, published in the Journal of Family Practice in 2006, concluded that eating 5 to 10 grams of soluble fiber per day was associated with a 10 to 15 percent reduction in LDL levels — which, the researchers estimated, could lower heart disease risk by 10 to 15 percent.
Other studies have assessed the effects of the specific types of soluble fiber, including oat beta-glucans, psyllium (a seed husk found in many over-the-counter laxatives), pectin (a carbohydrate found in many fruits and vegetables) and guar gum (derived from the beans of the guar plant).
In 1999, Harvard University researchers published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition a review of the evidence from 67 studies on the link between intake of different types of soluble fiber and blood cholesterol levels. The studies on oat products showed that getting an average of 5 grams of soluble fiber from oats for an average of 39 days reduced LDL levels by about 3.6 percent.
Oats were not the most powerful cholesterol reducers in the studies reviewed; psyllium lowered cholesterol levels about 6 percent among people who consumed an average of 9 grams for an average of 53 days, and an average of 4.7 grams of pectin consumed for an average of 34 days reduced cholesterol levels roughly 6.5 percent.
A more recent review, published last year in the journal Nutrition Reviews, looked at both the overall effects of fiber intake and the effects of specific types of soluble fiber on cholesterol levels and heart health. Pooling results from seven large studies that followed a total of 158,000 adults, the researchers found that heart disease prevalence was 29 percent lower in the group with the highest total dietary fiber intake compared with the lowest. But, of course, this could have been due to the overall healthier lifestyles among those who tend to eat high-fiber diets.
Researchers also found that consuming an average of about 6 grams of soluble fiber per day for about four to eight weeks reduced LDL by just over 5 percent; the reduction was similar when they looked specifically at studies on oat beta-glucan. The review was partially funded by the National Fiber Council.