Reducing Cholesterol

DIET MAKES A DIFFERENCE: Eating a low-fat diet packed with vegetables, fruit, beans and whole grains reduces levels of “bad” cholesterol twice as much as eating a low-fat diet that is heavy on processed foods, a small study has found.

Researchers said it suggests that at least in the short term, there’s more to healthy eating than counting fat grams and more to controlling cholesterol than taking drugs.

The study involved 120 adults and lasted four weeks. The group was divided in half and put on different low-fat weight-maintenance diets that had identical total fat, saturated fat, protein, carbohydrate and cholesterol content. The volunteers were not allowed to change their usual amount of exercise, and their weight stayed the same.

Half the test group followed a diet with large quantities of plant-based foods — vegetables, fruits, legumes, soy and whole grains — and limited amounts of meat and dairy.

The other half followed a diet that included packaged foods such as reduced-fat cheeses, lunch meat, frozen dinners, diet soda and fat-free cookies. Researchers described it as a more typical low- fat diet for U.S. consumers.

After a month, the plant-based diet group’s bad cholesterol dropped 9.4 percent compared with the prepared-foods diet group’s reductions of about 4.6 percent.

LIMITED DIET

PREDATOR BEHAVIOR: Different plants are rich in different nutrients, so many plant-eating animals must alter their diets daily to balance their intake of proteins, oils and minerals. By contrast, scientists have long thought, prey animals are so nutritionally rich that carnivorous predators need not worry about what to eat. Their challenge is just to catch something.

Not so, suggests new research by a team of scientists from Europe, Israel, New Zealand and Australia, who tested the supposition in predatory insects and spiders.

The team limited the diets of carnivorous beetles, hunting wolf spiders and web-building desert spiders to make them deficient in either protein or fat. Then they offered the predators prey especially rich in one or the other nutrient. The beetle and the wolf spider preferentially dined on the food best able to correct their deficiency, the team found. And although the web-builder had no choice about what landed in its web, it showed a surprising capacity to selectively absorb the particular nutrients it needed most.

The research does not explain how these predators sense and select the nutrients they need. But the findings should force a rethinking of standard ecological models of predator behavior, the team says.

MUSICAL RECALL

CAN’T GET IT OUT OF MY MIND: So “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie. Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry. . . .”

Mentally carrying that tune just now fired up the part of the brain that activates each time you actually hear that old song on the radio, new research suggests. And the same region of the brain will come to life when the song loops in your mind throughout the day.

Using brain scans to observe a common kind of musical recall, researchers at Dartmouth College have found that the auditory cortex, the neural nook that processes music coming through the ears, is also used to call up musical memories.

The recently published findings do not explain why the mental jukebox spontaneously switches on or gets stuck on certain songs. Instead, “we were interested in what the brain was doing when we had these very vivid sensory experiences,” said psychologist William Kelley.