Wellness Tip– Ella Kidder, Wellness Director
Eat This Sauce to Lower Cholesterol
To lower your LDL, dribble this sauce on pasta, hot sandwiches, and warm flatbreads – marinara. In one study, adults who had high cholesterol but were otherwise healthy were able to lower their LDL levels simply by eating lycopene-rich tomato products every day.
In the study, both men and women consumed at least 25 milligrams of lycopene every day for several weeks. That’s about as much lycopene as you would find in a mere half-cup serving of tomato sauce. By the end of the study period, most people had knocked their LDL levels down about 10% - the kind of improvement you would expect to see in someone taking a statin medication for a similar amount of time. Researchers think that lycopene reduces cholesterol in a couple of different ways: by inhibiting the production of LDL and breaking down the artery-clogging blood fat.