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Show t " ' ""l 7N 'f, By Robert Rodale W 1. s4 "Advance News Wif r. L?2 (: There must be hundreds of chemists around the world shaking all sorts of mole cules, natural and unnatural, into their tests tubes in the hope of discovering a new compound that can remove cholesterol deposits from human blood vessels. An admirable goal, because cholesterol does to our arteries what a road repair crew does to an expressway at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon. Except that cholesterol works around the clock, Sundays and holidays included. But strangely enough, these scientists recently learned that someone has beat them to the punch. Beat all of them. And who is this super scientist? Mother Nature, Ph.D. Adjunct Ad-junct Professor of Everything at the University of the Universe. Uni-verse. Never one to indulge in needless complexities, Doc Nature Na-ture has given her discovery a regular down-home kind of name: alfalfa, she calls it. In fact, Mother Nature kind of outdid herself with alfalfa. You see, medical scientists already have a pretty good idea of how to get at least some of the cholesterol out of clogged up arteries. All you have to do is to deny someone all but the tiniest amount of saturated fat and cholesterol in their diet and before too long, research suggests, some of the accumulated accumula-ted gook begins to disappear. dis-appear. But notice that 1 made that proposition a passive one: "Deny the person... saturated fat and cholesterol." Under tightly controlled conditions, with all their food being selected by someone else, people will eat such a diet, and are often better for it. But only the most powerfully motivated can stick to such a diet month after month, year after year. It means no bacon and eggs, bread without butter, coffee without cream, precious few desserts, very little meat, and grilled cheese sandwiches without the cheese and not grilled. While some people who are virtually at death's door with heart disease are able to eat an extremely low fat diet even when they aren't lodged in a clinic of some kind, the average person who is not dreadfully ill and even some who are dreadfully ill simply can't hack the Jack Sprat diet. Most Americans currently take in approximately 40 percent per-cent of all their dietary calories in the form of fat. Now, some of us, if we really put our minds to it, could reduce that figure to something like 30 percent, maybe even 20 percent, but it would be unrealistic to expect much more. That being the case, any "treatment" or alleviator of the cholesterol problem, in order to be really practical, would have to be able to do its good work even while the person continued to ingest considerably more cholesterol and fat than is ideal. And that's why alfalfa, which once sounded silly, now sounds so exciting. New research shows that when the diet is supplemented supple-mented with generous amounts of alfalfa, cholesterol deposits are scrubbed out of the arteries even when cholesterol is being ingested in amounts ordinarily sufficient to cause fatty deposits. depos-its. I wish it were possible to report that this work has been done in human beings and that we could all get ourselves a jug of alfalfa tablets or a bag of alfalfa seeds to sprout and go into the cholesterol-reaming business. But it isn't. Not just yet, anyway. The research was carried out on a large group of monkeys at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center in Beaverton, Oregon, and the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Cleveland, Ohio, by a team of scientists led by M.R. Malinow, M.D. In the first stage of the experiment, the monkeys were given a good dose of atherosclerosis by feeding them lots of cholesterol. After six months a group of the animals were sacrificed and the key arteries feeding the heart examined so that the degree of disease could be determined. Following that, the remaining animals were divided into various diet groups, including straight commercial monkey chow, a semi-purified diet containing cholsterol, finally the same cholesterol diet plus 50 percent sun-cured alfalfa meal. As might be expected, the animals which received no cholesterol and simply ate the commercial chow, had very few signs of atherosclerosis, while the group fed cholesterol without anything protective in the diet developed the worst damage. But the really interesting interest-ing find was that the animals receiving cholesterol plus alfalfa had at autopsy, arteries as "clean" as the monkeys which were fed only monkey chow and no cholsterol at all! -In words of the authors, the "monkeys receiving alfalfa showed evidence evi-dence of 'healing'. ..Thus, these results suggest that alfalfa counteracts atherogenicity (tendency (ten-dency to cause clogged arteries) of dietary cholesterol." The amount of cholesterol fed to these animals was "comparable "compar-able to the habitual diet of man in the U.S.," the author points out. However, we have to stress that alfalfa in these experiments was given as 50 percent of the diet, an amount greater than any man, we think, would or could eat as part of his daily fare. So at least two questions remain. The first is whether alfalfa has the same effect on humans that it does on monkeys. No one knows, of course unless some scientist has already carried out experiments experi-ments of which I'm unaware but it would be surprising if there's not at least a very similar effect. The second question is probably more critical, and that is how much alfalfa would a person have to eat in order to obtain some meaningful benefit from this plant? Would, say, one ounce have any effect on cholesterol metabolism? We can only guess. ..but hope- that it would! |