Eating plenty of apples means you're eating plenty of pectins. The website of a cooperative organization of apple growers in northern Italy (http://www.melavi.com/) that discusses a broad range of apple properties cites four controlled research projects in which human subjects increased their daily apple consumption. All the studies found that the subjects' cholesterol levels became lower. In one case 235 persons ate three apples a day for two months and achieved an average of a 5.1-percent reduction. The average decline in an Irish study involving 76 subjects who ate two apples a day for four months was 8.1 percent. A French project tracked 30 middle-aged adults who consumed two to three apples a day for a month. Among 15 of them the cholesterol decrease was between 10 and zero percent. The other 15 had major reductions ranging from 11.7 percent to 29.2 percent. Another finding from the French study was that the high-apple diet increased the proportion of beneficial cholesterol (HDL, or high-density lipoproteins) relative to harmful LDL (low-density lipoproteins) cholesterol.
     The French researchers, who published their work in 1983 in Nutrition Research (vol. 3, pp. 325-328), made an additional observation. The cholesterol reductions were greater than could be accounted for compared to direct ingestion of purified pectins. They wrote, "Thus we must assume that pectins directly derived from apples are more efficient than purified molecules artificially added to the diet and/or that pectins have a synergic effect with other components of apples." That is, apples are a good way to get your pectin because they wondrously deliver a bonus benefit beyond the pectin.
     Nutrition and health writer Jean Carper made the same point in her book Food-Your Miracle Medicine. She quoted Dr. David Kritchevsky, a renowned cardiovascular researcher at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, Pa., as stating that apple intake "lowers cholesterol more than its pectin content predicts. Something else is at work also." Eating two or three apples a day engages complex and beneficial physiological processes in the task of reducing blood cholesterol.

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