We’ve all seen the commercials for Cheerios and they always somewhere throw in that, “Cheerios can help low cholesterol”. See it would be false advertising if they were just saying that and they really didn’t help do anything for your health at all, so there has to be some truth behind the statement. It could only lower it a little bit, say by 1%, which means they can still say that it does lower your cholesterol. It could lower it by 30% though, which is a lot more significant and worth noting on your box than 1%. So do Cheerios really influence your diet and help with that bad cholesterol?
First off, what is cholesterol? Cholesterol is waxy and fat-like and is found in all the cells of your body. It’s used to make hormones and helps you digest food easier. Lipoproteins are what a pack of cholesterol is called, which moves through your bloodstream, and are made of fat on 
the outside and proteins on the inside. There are two types of lipoproteins, good and bad ones, high-density (HDL) and low-density (LDL). Too much of either is bad, but too much LDL can cause blockage in your arteries, which blocks blood flow to the heart. So, you want to keep your arteries clear and blood flowing and you do that with having a good balance of cholesterol.
Livestrong reported in their article about a study that was performed by Dr. Kevin C. Maki where he tested to see if Cheerios really did lower cholesterol. At the start of the study, they recorded everyone’s blood cholesterol level and did the same after the study was over. In the study they used regular Cheerios with 100% natural whole grain oats with one gram of sugar per serving. The subjects were fed two 1 1/2-cup servings of Cheerios for 12 weeks and ate a reduced calorie diet. The subjects’ diets were monitored for the whole 12 weeks and at the end, Dr. Maki concluded that Cheerios can in fact, lower cholesterol levels by about 10% in one month.
In a similar study done by the Bell Institute of Health and Nutrition, the same conclusion was drawn. They also fed their subjects 1 1/2 cups of Cheerios twice a day for 12 weeks along with a reduced calorie diet. Although in this study, there were two groups, the Cheerio group and the control group. The Cheerio group was obviously the one eating the Cheerios and the control group was eating 1 1/2 servings of foods that were similar to Cheerios in calories. After 4 weeks, the Cheerio group lowered their LDL cholesterol about 10% and the control group only about 5%. After 12 weeks, the same results still stood, where the Cheerio group had reduced their cholesterol more than the control group.
From these two studies, that drew the same conclusion, I can conclude that Cheerios can lower your LDL (bad) cholesterol in about 12 weeks. This is only if you are eating a healthy diet with other low cholesterol foods like Cheerios. These studies could have been improved by giving the information on how many subjects there were and their ages and genders and things like that, which would back it up more. If the people all were already pretty healthy, then lowering their cholesterol would be easier than someone who had very high cholesterol and not as healthy. Eat your Cheerios!
Caitlin – Speaking of the FDA and what they regulate, I came across a letter from the FDA to Cheerios saying something along the lines that if Cheerios wants to say that their food is helping a medical problem, they are going to have to be considered a drug and which means they will have to go through a whole process to do that. They go on and on about how Cheerios is a new unapproved drug, imagine if that was the case?! But Cheerios just backed themselves up with saying that the FDA approved the health claim over 12 years ago and gave the statistics of the studies that have been done proving that Cheerios help with cholesterol. Funny to think that Cheerios could have been considered a drug.
I had no idea that if something could affect a consumer by as little as 1%, the company could still list it. This is what confuses and angers me about advertising. Advertisements are always seem to mold to the consumer’s wants. Some of this could be healthy outcomes to consuming this good. But this is why the FDA is running. This is what the FDA regulates. They check advertising and make sure they are accurate. But since Cheerios have seemed to “kind of” help cholesterol a little, they are approved to say they do.