Many people are now very cautious about eating foods that have much cholesterol. These are all animal products – meat, eggs, and so on. I’m lucky that I can eat some of these in a balanced diet. All of us absolutely need cholesterol, and we even make it in our bodies. Other people can overbalance if they get too much in their diet.
Excellent advice is to eat mostly plant-derived foods such as grains, fruits, nuts, and vegetables. Fats in plant foods include compounds, the phytosterols, that look very similar to cholesterol but have no cholesterol-liker effects in us. Love those avocados! Even as I’m primarily a plant biologist, I was surprised that some plants have cholesterol. The news comes from Marianna Boccia and 8 colleagues in Germany and Mexico. Don’t worry. The cholesterol is in tiny but critical amounts, notably in the Solanaceae – tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, deadly nightshade, and such.
Unlike animals, the plants don’t need scads of it to fill the membranes of every cell. Rather, cholesterol is an intermediate chemical formed in one step toward making defensive chemicals against insects that are serious pests to them. The researchers knocked out a gene in black nightshade that codes for an enzyme making cholesterol. Trouble for those plants; they’ll hold onto that gene!
This has been an outreach activity of the Las Cruces Academy, viewable at GreatSchools.org
Source: Science, 20 December, pp. 1368 ff.
