Lyle Hurd: We are happy to welcome back Robert Kowalski with us the author of “The 8-Week Cholesterol Cure”, “The New 8-Week Cholesterol Cure” Could you tell us a little about plant sterols, what they are and how they fit into this whole equation? Robert Kowalski: Oh, Lyle, it’s one of the reasons that there is a NEW 8-week cholesterol cure as a matter of fact. That is one of the things that I told my publisher when I said I got to re-write this book, not edit it, not revise it, do a complete re-write because I want a whole chapter that I am going to call “How to block the cholesterol in the foods that you love to eat” Lyle Hurd: How to block the cholesterol. Robert Kowalski: How to block the cholesterol from ever getting into your blood stream. There, just, just as all animal tissue, you, me, the foods we eat, all animals have cholesterol in the tissues. Can’t live with out it in the same way, in the plant kingdom there is a there is a counter called phyto-sterols, or plant sterols. Cholesterol is an animal sterol; in plants we have plant sterols. They are virtually identical in terms of a molecular structure. Lyle Hurd: Really? Robert Kowalski: Just one little difference if you were to look at the molecular structures which I actually put into the book so people can see the similarities. They are so similar Lyle, that the human body can’t tell the difference either. So if you take these sterols at about the time you are eating a meal especially, the body perceives those plant sterols as cholesterol. They are taken into the little receptor sites, specialized cells called mycelles in the first third of the digestive tract. The body takes those into the receptor sites, those sites are limited so once they are filled, and they’re filled. It’s like how many rooms in the Holiday Inn. Once they are filled there is no room for cholesterol anymore so when you eat foods with cholesterol, out it goes out the other end. We can take it in a couple of different ways; one is with our meals at the beginning of a meal as supplements, a simple couple of tablets. For 10 years I never ate a single egg yolk from 1984-1994 when I started reading about the plant sterols and I started experimenting. There was no product on the market at that point in time, nothing. So I literally had to have a friend of mine from the supplement industry order some for me especially from Japan so I could experiment with it. I put it in little gelatin capsules and started taking it myself and found that I could eat all the eggs I wanted to. In fact it not only didn’t raise the level of the LDL the bad cholesterol, it raised the level of good cholesterol. So my lipid profile, my cholesterol picture was improved now that I was eating eggs and those kinds of foods. Shrimp, all the other foods that is particularly rich in cholesterol. Today sterols are still available as supplements and I carry a little packet along with me especially when I go to breakfast on a weekend with my buddies before going off on a golf course, we will have breakfast together and it is so nice now instead of having to have an egg white omelet to have a couple of eggs over-easy or whatever it happens to be. Lyle Hurd: What are we looking for when we go to the health food store, the health food store as I understand is where you would go; plant sterols and literally what they do is they fill the receptors, you can have, I eat eggs everyday because I feel they are important to me, I don’t take plant sterols, I am going to look into it now, I mean it sounds like a wonderful opportunity. Robert Kowalski: Oh, it’s amazing! I’ll tell you at first it sounds too good to be true. That’s the first response that people have, “Oh, come on, that’s snake oil, how can that happen.” 1500 papers have been written and published in the medical literature on this. 1500, showing total safety because it never gets into the blood stream, you see. So it stays in the digestive tract, it stays in those receptor sites it