The great thing about this program is that if you choose to kick processed foods to the curb, and adopt a whole food organic diet, your physical symptoms should start to fade away as your body will naturally start to heal itself.   This next part is about how to manage cholesterol.  It is as easy as it gets.  However, in addition to the study I am sharing that makes lowering your cholesterol easy,  there are a quite a few foods that also support managing a healthy cholesterol level that you will want to explore in addition to the Brazil Nuts. 

1. Oats and other whole grains that are high in fiber
2. Sweet Potatoes
3. Beans
4.  Garlic
5. Green Tea (Caution, this has caffeine) 
6. Salmon
7. Leafy Greens
8. Avocados
9. Extra-Virgin Olive Oil 
10. Chia Seeds
11. Nuts – Especially Brazil Nuts – Read below

One of the craziest studies that was sourced from Dr. Greger  involved feeding people a single serving of Brazil nuts to see what it would do to the cholesterol levels of healthy volunteers. They gave ten men and women a single meal containing zero, one, four, or eight Brazil nuts, and found that the ingestion of just that single serving almost immediately improved cholesterol levels. LDL, so-called “bad” cholesterol levels in the blood, was significantly lower starting just nine hours after the ingestion of nuts, and by no insignificant amount, nearly 20 points within a day. Even drugs don’t work that fast. It takes statins around four days to have a significant effect.

But that’s not even the crazy part.

The researchers went back and measured their cholesterol five days later, and then 30 days later. Now, keep in mind they weren’t eating Brazil nuts this whole time. They just had that single serving of Brazil nuts a month before and their cholesterol was still down 30 days later. It went down and stayed down, after eating just four nuts… That’s nuts!

And no, the study was not funded by the Brazil nut industry.

Interestingly, four nuts actually seemed to work faster than the eight nuts to lower bad cholesterol and boost good cholesterol. These results suggest that eating just four nuts might be enough to improve the levels of LDL and HDL for up to 30 days, and maybe longer.  They didn’t test this past 30 days.

Now normally, when a study comes out in the medical literature showing some “too-good-to-be-true” result like this, you want to wait to see the results replicated before you change your clinical practice, before you recommend something to your patients, particularly when the study is done on only ten people, and especially when the findings are literally just too incredible to be believed. But when the intervention is cheap, easy, harmless, and healthy—eating four Brazil nuts a month—then, in my opinion, the burden of proof is kind of reversed. I think the reasonable default position is to do it until proven otherwise. I have shared this approach with many people that I work with and they have all had amazing results.

They concluded a single serving was sufficient “without producing liver and kidney toxicity.” What they’re referring to is the high selenium content of Brazil nuts—so high that four eaten every day may actually bump us up against the tolerable daily limit for selenium.  However, this is not something we have to worry about if we’re just eating four once a month. This is really an cheap and easy solution that is good for you too!

Even eating nuts every day does not appear to result in expected weight gain (Nuts and Obesity: The Weight of Evidence), so enjoy!

Brain Health

We love Brazil nuts for Brain Health since it may have a protective and anti-depressant effect.  One ounce of Brazil nuts may contain almost 1,000% of the recommended daily allowance of selenium. In addition to that, Brazil nuts also contains Vitamin B1, Vitamin B6, Vitamin E, Calcium, Copper, Magnesium, Manganese, Phosphorous and Zinc.  For Suson Essentials, nutrient dense foods are the way to go.  In addition, most of us need to focus on adding more minerals to our body to maintain a healthy brain.  Some pesticides, like glyphosate pull the minerals out of our soil and of course out of our bodies.  So, this is one of many ways to start replenishing your body with the minerals that it needs.