If you have high cholesterol, or you want to keep your own cholesterol levels in the healthy range, the best thing you can do is understand how what you eat interacts with your body's production of cholesterol. Fruits, like mangosteens, rarely contain enough fat to interfere with cholesterol production, but they can affect your cholesterol levels in other ways.
Cholesterol Basics
Your body makes two kinds of cholesterol in response to the presence of two kinds of fat in your diet. LDL cholesterol is the bad cholesterol you've read about for decades. Although important to your tissue health, it can also clog your arteries and make your heart work harder to do its job. It increases your risk for high blood pressure, heart disease, heart attack and stroke. HDL cholesterol actually cleans the LDL out of your system, improving circulatory health. Eating saturated fats stimulates your body to produce LDL cholesterol. You make HDL cholesterol when you eat unsaturated fats.
Mangosteen Basics
Mangosteen are large, purple fruits with a thick rind native to the Philippines and other Pacific islands. They can be eaten as fruit, but are most popular in the West for their juice, which some people drink for its reputed medical benefits.
Mangosteen Nutrition
The U.S. Department of Agriculture provides nutrition data on hundreds of thousands of foods, including mangosteens. According to the USDA, a typical 1-cup serving of mangosteen has only trace amounts of either saturated or unsaturated fat. This is not enough to substantively affect your cholesterol production. A cup of mangosteen contains 3.5 g of dietary fiber, a substance known to accelerate how quickly your body can clean itself of harmful LDL.
Micronutrients
Like many fruits, mangosteens are rich in micronutrients that may be beneficial to your health. Among these is polyphenol, which may interfere with your body's ability to absorb fat -- a feature that can reduce the LDL your body produces in response to saturated fat in your diet.
Bottom Line
Although mangosteens don't have enough fat to affect how much cholesterol your body produces, the dietary fiber and micronutrients in mangosteens may help your body lower its levels of LDL cholesterol. However, it's worth noting that you would have to eat a lot of mangosteens to make a substantive difference. Mangosteens are, on the whole, a cholesterol-neutral food.
References
- USDA: Nutrition Database for Standard Reference
- "Eat, Drink and Be Healthy"; Walter Willett; 2004
- CDC: Dietary Cholesterol
- Live in the Philipines: What is a Mangosteen?
