Abstract
Our previous studies indicate that the addition of crystalline sterols of soybean and corn at 0.2% levels of the hypercholesterolemic diet caused significant reduction in the plasma cholesterol level. Those crystalline sterols were gaschromatographically mixtures of β-sitosterol, stigmasterol and campesterol. The present paper is concerned with the effect of highly purified stigmasterol and β-sitosterol on the plasma and liver cholesterol.
The results showed that the addition of pure stigmasterol at 0.1% level of the diet significantly reduced the plasma cholesterol but not liver and adrenal cholesterol. The addition of β-sitosterol which contains chromatographically 5% of impurities resulted the similar effect on reduction of the plasma cholesterol.
