PLANT STEROLS? Phytosterols and other such words.

 Tuesday and Wednesday were a blur. Here are a few highlights.

Tuesday I met with the base nutritionist/dietician again. She had ALL the cholesterol numbers and we charted them. We were able to see clearly why the alarm was raised this year and not last year. I've always had HIGH HDL (good) cholesterol. While my number has hovered at 250, they were content to let me manage with lifestyle as my HDL was high and my overall magic ratio was 4.

For some reason, and the only ones anyone are coming with are genetics, my HDL tanked. Big time. I continued my lifestyle and all expected it to be HIGHER which would have made my ratio LOWER.....but even with workout, limited simple carbs, 13 servings of produce a day blah, blah, blah.....my HDL dropped by nearly 1/2. This is not a good sign and it now puts my ratio at 5.68 - which is over 4. where they push meds.

Debbie is wonderful. We discussed what I was doing. She told me to continue with flax oil, she thought the fish oil could go as the flax oil is full of Omega 3. She told me about new studies into plant sterols. It seems that there IS research that shows that for THOSE WITH HIGH CHOL. adding CONCENTRATED amounts of plant sterol can lower your number 10-15%. These are found in small amount in produce and vegetable oils. She said that you can't get the concentrated amounts from produce consumption alone - and I didn't want to try to eat any more produce....believe me. She said that there are NO PREVENTATIVE benefits that they've noticed to plant sterols and so she is ticked at how fortified products are being advertised. She said if you HAVE high chol it often lowers it, but it will not keep you from developing high chol.

Debbie said that they've fortified margarine, orange juice and yogurt with this. It's expensive and should be my stash. She suggested I add this in addition to the cholesterol meds. My numbers need to come down at least 30%. I looked and could not find these products in the stores. I did find the FDA article on this....and it seems that they've made a "margarine like" product from soybean oil (which is high in plant sterols)....but I avoid soy. I'm looking to see what products or what form I can find this in that would be fairly natural without a lot of fillers.

Tuesday night was Bible study. I was excited to see women had done their homework and could discuss the book even when I varied from the written homework. That's a wonderful sign that they have spent lots of time in the book of Ephesians. I passed out books and we are well prepared now to use anothers work for a couple of months. In other words we took 3 weeks and I walked the group through doing a complete overview of the book - NOW we can use another's guidance and we'll be on better footing as to what the book is all about. The great news is that the group grew and we ran out of books. I'm hoping more arrive soon.

Wednesday was another blur of activity as we got ready for Mike and Jamin's big adventure. I'll write a seperate post about that.

In the midst of this, I'm learning our new United catalog and how to use spreadsheets, trying to help others figure out how they work (nearly blind leading the blind?), and trying to get 1/2 finished tasks off my plate....and transferring comptuer data from one to another. ::snort::