Plant Sterols - In Your Food and Potentially Harmful

Plant Sterols

The facts below are according to the Health Canada Website (unless otherwise specified).

Plant Sterols occur naturally in fruits, vegetables and nuts; plant based foods. However they have been taken from the foods they naturally occur in and added to other foods such as: B and C spreads, mayonnaise, margarine, calorie-reduced margarine, salad dressing, yogurt and yogurt drinks, vegetable and fruit juices.

Plant sterols lower LDL-cholesterol (low density lipoprotein) which is good as LDL-cholesterol is known as a risk factor for heart disease. Plant sterols do this by mimicking cholesterol in the small intestine and partly block cholesterol absorption. However while eating up to 3 grams of plant sterol for adults and 1 gram for children per day is good, excess is not. 

The reason Health Canada decided to allow plant sterols, also known as phytosterols, to be added to certain foods is because recent studies have shown that about fifty percent of Canadian adults have high cholesterol.

Companies are allowed to add up to one gram of plant sterols per serving to the products mentioned above. This means if your child eats more then a serving of mayonnaise, yogurt, margarine or salad dressing and has a glass or two of juice a day they may have over exceeded their intake. Also if you are on medication to lower your cholesterol and are eating any of the foods, plant sterols are being added to, then it is recommended that you see your doctor as the dosage of your medication may need to be adjusted. In fact, plant sterols while considered safe within the guidelines set by Health Canada are not recommended for children, breast-feeding or pregnant women. 

According to wise GEEK (www.wisegeek.com) consuming two or more grams daily for more than a month may result in reduced plasma carotenoid levels. There are some indications that these reductions can be prevented by eating five servings of green, yellow, and orange fruits and vegetables which can be packed with carotenoids, an important group of plant pigments. Other health concerns regarding plant sterols include risks of atherosclerosis and plaques that build up and produce heart attacks or strokes.

Leslie Beck R.D. from the site www.medcan.com says that people with a rare genetic disorder called sitosterolemia, or who are carriers for the disease, should not use plant sterol enriched foods or supplements. In sitosterolemia, plant sterols are not broken down correctly by the body causing them to accumulate in the blood, which can cause damage to body tissues. 

Also because Plant sterols aren’t considered an essential nutrient in Canada they do NOT have to be included on the nutrition label. So unless a company is like BECEL and wants to advertise that their product lowers cholesterol, you as the consumer would need to call the company in order to find out if they are adding plant sterols to their food products or not.