Before there was a Portfolio Diet, there was a Gorilla Diet.
In a tiny two-week study, people ate a mountain of raw leaves, fruit and vegetables — and their LDL cholesterol dropped about 30 percent. Almost nobody wanted to keep eating that way, so Dr. David Jenkins tried to bottle the effect in a diet people could actually follow. That became the Portfolio Diet: soy protein, nuts, plant sterols, and viscous fiber — mainly psyllium.
Here’s the question that caught my attention. In the major Portfolio study, the whole package beat the control diet by about ten percentage points of LDL. But psyllium alone, in its own randomized trials, lands in roughly that same neighborhood.
That doesn’t prove the psyllium did all the work. But the arithmetic is close enough to make you wonder how much the nuts and margarines were really adding.
And there’s the catch. The ingredient that may be doing the heavy lifting is also the one with a quality problem: ConsumerLab found lead in every psyllium product it tested, and excessive amounts in several of them. Which is exactly why I’d rather get my soluble fiber from beans, oats, barley, yams and berries.
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