MEDICINE / HEART DISEASE : Two of These Candy Bars a Day May Keep Your Cardiologist Away
Here’s some health news you may find a little hard to swallow: a cholesterol-lowering candy bar.
The Cardiobar, as it’s called, is not on the market yet, but its inventors at the University of Massachusetts say it--or something like it--could have a powerful effect on people’s cholesterol.
The Cardiobar was one of hundreds of new medical products presented at the American Heart Assn.’s 68th Scientific Sessions. The conference, which drew about 29,000 to the Anaheim Convention Center on Monday, runs through Thursday.
The Cardiobar recipe doesn’t sound like anything Grandma might have thought of. Each bar contains gum from the guar plant, soy protein and a variety of rice bran oil--ingredients thought to have a good effect on cholesterol.
Dr. Robert J. Nicolosi and colleagues worked out the ingredients and had the bars made by Ross-Abbott Labs in Columbus, Ohio, which helped pay to test them.
“It’s not that palatable to say the least,” said Dr. Eugene Rogers, who helped Nicolosi develop the nutrient bar at the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Control at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. “But this is just a first-generation Cardiobar. It will be an easy problem to solve.”
Another drawback of consuming the bar is that it can give you gas, Rogers said. In the future, less fiber will be blended into the bars, and should eliminate the problem, Rogers said.
“That will be solved,” he said.
The bars, which come in chocolate and raspberry, were fed to 35 people whose cholesterol levels averaged a moderately elevated 263. Volunteers who ate two a day lowered their cholesterol an impressive 33 points on average.
When the bars will hit the market and how much they will cost are still unclear.
Until recently, all emphasis in heart-healthy eating has been on cutting out the bad stuff, largely saturated fat and cholesterol-laden food. These diets clearly can lower cholesterol in the blood. But they often do so at the expense of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol--HDL--the so-called good cholesterol.
Now scientists are looking for foods they can be added to a low-fat diet so they work better without sacrificing HDL.
Volunteers who tested the Cardiobars were first put on a strict low-fat diet, then given two batches of candy bars and told to eat two a day.
Some were genuine Cardiobars. The rest were look-alikes made from less beneficial varieties of fiber, protein and oil. No one knew at the time who got what. But all eventually ate both types so that doctors could compare the effects of both snacks in each volunteer.
The result: Their cholesterol levels fell 33 points when they ate Cardiobars, but there was no significant change when they ate the impostor bars.
Moreover, the only kind of cholesterol that went down was their bad low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, the LDL. Their HDL levels did not change.
Each bar has 200 calories, although the researchers are working on 100-calorie varieties.
“What we are looking for is a health bar that you would substitute for a meal,” Nicolosi said. “We would not want people to think they can eat whatever they want and then have a couple of these candy bars.”
Indeed, they don’t have to be candy bars at all. Nicolosi said he hopes the food industry will come up with frozen dinners and other products containing the cholesterol-lowering ingredients.
Dr. Russell V. Luepker, program chairman at the conference, said doctors have come to rely so heavily on cholesterol-lowering drugs, such as lovastatin, that they may underestimate the power of healthy eating.
Times staff writers Martin Miller and Greg Hernandez contributed to this report.
