How Effective are Oreo Cookies at Lowering Cholesterol?

Are you looking for a reason to rationalize eating Oreo cookies? I may have found an experiment that can back you up.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not endorsing Oreo cookies. They are highly processed foods that contain lots of sugar, carbs and seed oils.

They can, however, be useful to prove a point.

Dr. Nick Norwitz is a Harvard researcher and a big fan of the low-carb lifestyle. He’s definitely worth following on social media. He posts lots of interesting research on ketogenic diets.

Dr. Norwitz has markers that qualify him as a Lean Mass Hyper Responder (LMHR). These people have high LDL cholesterol (bad cholesterol) and good HDL and Triglycerides.

· Dr Norwitz started the exercise with an LDL-C of 384mg/dL

· HDL greater than 80mg/dL

· Triglycerides less than or equal to 70mg/dL

The reason lean people can have such high LDL cholesterol levels has to do with the depletion of glycogen in the liver due to carbohydrate restriction.

He performed an experiment on himself to show that Oreo cookies could be more effective at lowering his LDL cholesterol than an intensive regimen of statin drugs.

The experiment started with a 2-week period where Dr Horwitz ate a ketogenic diet. Then he ate 12 Oreo cookies a day for 16 days, adding 100 grams of carbohydrates per day to his diet.

He stayed in ketosis during the ‘Oreo period’ by also supplementing with exogenous ketones four times daily.

At the end of the 16 days, Dr Norwitz washed the effects of the Oreos out of his system with a 3 month period eating just a ketogenic diet minus the cookies.

Then he started the statin regimen. He took rosuvastatin at a dose of 20mg/day for 6 weeks.

Dr Norwitz drew lipid panels from his blood before and after each round of ‘therapy’.

The results were dramatically different:

· For the Oreo cookies, his LDL-C went from 384mg/dL to 111mg/dL in 16 days

· For the statin drugs his LDL-C decreased from 421 mg/dL to 284mg/dL

In other words, Oreo cookies were more than TWICE as effective at driving down LDL cholesterol for Dr Norwitz as statin drugs.

He saw a 71% drop in LDL with the Oreos and only a 32% drop with the statins.

Like me Dr Norwitz wants to emphasize that he is not endorsing Oreos as part of a health program. He wanted to pick something that would attract attention.

I think he succeeded.

This experiment sure makes you wonder about the effectiveness of statin drugs. It also makes me think that maybe LDL cholesterol is not the heart attack risk so many doctors say it is.

I’m definitely not dispensing medical advice here. This experiment just made me chuckle and helped me to think more about how so much in healthcare doesn’t make sense.