That right there is some cholesterol in plants but at a much lower level than those found in meat. In fact the levels are so low that the labels on canned vegetables and frozen vegetable packages always list the amount of cholesterol as zero. There are currently several articles on other websites that clearly states that plants do not contain cholesterol. These articles are wrong.
It seems odd that the words “plants and cholesterol” can be found together in the same sentence. As mentioned in the introduction, plants do contain cholesterol. As a matter of fact there is one plant, the European False Flax that contains as much as 200 mg of cholesterol per kg of plant oil.This plant is used as vegetable oil and used in animal feed. Despite it high cholesterol level, it contains a high level of heart healthy omega-3-fatty acid. For comparison, animals can contain as much as 5000 mg of cholesterol per kg. Cholesterol averages in plants on a whole is about 50 mg per kg or 100 times less than the levels found in meat. Plants contain about 250 steroids and the predominant one is called sitosterol. This cholesterol is found mostly in the leaves of the plant. The good news is that the cholesterol in plants behaves differently and in a beneficial way in our body versus the cholesterol produced by animals. Sitosterol blocks the intake of dietary cholesterol and reduced the level of low-density lipoprotein in our blood. This plant cholesterol is also used in the treatment of breast cancer, prostate cancer, and in the treatment of hair loss when used with Saw Palmetto.
Currently there are many research studies going on, especially in the European countries, to determine other beneficial uses of this cholesterol found in plants. However, too much of a good thing can be bad for you. It has been determined that high levels of sitosterol can cause coronary diseases and tendon xanthomas, a condition that affect the tendons due to high levels of lipoprotein in the blood. Hpwever, there are many more molecules in our body that share the same chemical structure of cholesterol. This is the reason we need some cholesterol in our body to produce other molecules with that chemical structure.
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