2008: April 23rd Good News (4 Million Dollar Violin Returned to Musician; Postwoman Catches Falling Baby, more...)

Good Morning All,

Well I found a new website that I'd like to share with you all today. It's got a lot of great news articles on it about discoveries, breakthroughs, and other good news. It is: http://www.eurekalert.org/pubnews.php . I got one article from it today about how a particular chocolate bar can help lower cholesterol. After I found that article, I browsed the other articles available there, and there are some very good interesting ones that I haven't seen elsewhere.

Anyway, today there were LOTS of great articles to share! My favorites are the one about the violinist whose 4 MILLION dollar Stradivarius violin was returned to him; the one about the postwoman who just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and catch a falling baby; and the article about the seashells in the ocean that are combating CO2. :)

I hope you all enjoy today's many posts! I'll see you tomorrow!

Today's Top 5:
1. Fiji Dig Yields Fine Jewelry From Early Lapitas (San Francisco Chronicle)
2. Musician Reunited with $4M Violin He Left in N.J. Cab (Yahoo News)
3. Earliest Oil Paintings Discovered in Afghanistan (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
4. Can Seashells Save the World? (Irish Independent)
5. Postwoman Catches Falling Baby (Telegraph UK)

Honorable Mention:
1. Mother's Diet Influences Infant Sex: High Energy Intake Linked to Conception of Sons (Science Daily)
2. Gorilla Population Up 24 Years After Genocide (NPR)
3. Shakira Lobbies Congress on Education for Poor (NPR)
4. It Doesn't Have Sex and Should be Extinct – So How Come this Fish is Thriving? (The Scotsman)
5. Chocolate Bar Shown to Lower Cholesterol (Eurekalert.org)


Today's Top 5:

1. Fiji Dig Yields Fine Jewelry From Early Lapitas
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/04/23/international/i001426D26.DTL&feed=rss.business
By PITA LIGAIULA, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, April 23, 2008(04-23) 00:14 PDT SUVA, Fiji (AP) --

Excavators of the earliest human settlement in Fiji have found a cache of jewelry and high quality pottery dating back some 3,000 years and made by the Stone Age colonizers of the South Pacific.
Patrick Nunn, professor of Oceanic Geoscience at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, announced the find Tuesday. He said the two-month excavation he led at Bourewa Beach on the southwest coast of Fiji's main island, Viti Levu, revealed stilt houses built above the sea, quantities of Lapita-decorated pottery, stone tools and jewelry.
"These people were artists," Nunn told The Associated Press.
The Lapita people are believed to have migrated eastward from the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea to Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Solomon Islands and other Pacific islands.
The Bourewa Beach settlement was the earliest yet uncovered in Fiji by about 200 years, said Nunn, who directed the project supported by Fiji Museum and researchers from universities in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the United States and Britain.
Fiji Museum staffer Sepeti Matararaba found the jewelry, made from shells, under an upturned clay pot, put there by someone about 3,000 years ago. When Matararaba turned the pot over, he uncovered a cache of nine shell rings of different sizes, four shell bracelets and six necklace pieces complete with drill holes.
Peter Shepphard, an associate professor of anthropology at Auckland University in New Zealand who works on early Lapita and other settlements in the Solomon Islands, described the finds as "extraordinary" and from "a very important site."
The site was likely a manufacturing center for shell jewelry and the cache a "deliberate burial of a shell jewelry collection" by the Lapita inhabitants, Nunn said.
"These are the first people in the South Pacific, they are a Stone Age people," he said. "Within a decade or so of arriving in Fiji they were producing exquisite shell jewelry ... they were producing intricately decorated pottery."
Nunn said the Lapitas disappeared by about 550 B.C. as a distinctive cultural group: "After that, you don't see anyone in Fiji making shell jewelry like that, or pottery like that."
He said that fact is interesting because it is opposite of what would be expected — the production of crude pottery and crude jewelry at the start of the settlement 3,000 years ago getting more sophisticated toward the present.
"We're still a long way off knowing why this is," he said.
Shepphard, who was not involved in the Fiji project, said the decorations of the early settlers reveal an effort to retain their ties to their homeland area in the Bismarck Archipelago.



2. Musician Reunited with $4M Violin He Left in N.J. Cab
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080423/ap_en_mu/missing_violin
Wednesday Apr 23, 12:42 AM ET NEWARK, N.J.

A Grammy-nominated violinist has been reunited with a $4 million violin he left in the back of a cab. Grammy-nominated violinist Philippe Quint exited a minivan cab at New York City's Battery Park early Monday, leaving the 1723 Antonio Stradivari "Ex-Keisewetter" inside.
The violin spent the remainder of the night on the seat of the cab, which owner Mohamed Khalil parked on a Newark street. By the morning, he was still unaware of what he was carrying.
By then, the frantic Quint was calling the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and Newark's Taxi Commission, which put the word out that the violin was missing.
Monday afternoon, Khalil checked his taxi while at Newark Liberty International Airport and discovered the violin case with the instrument inside.
Quint soon arrived, dropped to his knees and shed tears of joy.


3. Earliest Oil Paintings Discovered in Afghanistan
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/04/23/2224776.htm
Posted Wed Apr 23, 2008 8:23am AEST Updated 4 hours 51 minutes ago

Scientists say they have proved the world's first ever oil paintings were in caves near two destroyed giant statues of Buddha in Afghanistan.
Samples from paintings, dating from the 7th century AD, were taken from caves in Bamiyan.
The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in France said on its website that scientists have discovered paintings in 12 of the 50 caves were created using oil paints - possibly from walnut or poppy.
"This is the earliest clear example of oil paintings in the world ... drying oils were already used by ancient Romans and Egyptians, but only as medicines and cosmetics," said Yoko Taniguchi, leader of the team of scientists.
It was not until the 13th century that oil was added to paints in Europe. Oil paint was not widely used in Europe till the early 15th century.
Bamiyan was once a thriving Buddhist centre where monks lived in a series of caves carved into the cliffs near the two giant statues.
The cave paintings were probably the work of artists travelling along the Silk Road and show scenes of Buddhas in vermilion robes and mythical creatures, the ESRF said.
Afghanistan's Taliban Government used dozens of explosive charges to bring down the two 6th century giant Buddhas in March 2001, saying the statues were un-Islamic.
Now work is underway to try restore the biggest of the two statues - once the tallest standing Buddha in the world.
The mammoth task could take a decade to complete.



4. Can Seashells Save the World?
http://www.independent.ie/world-news/can-seashells-save-the-world-1356404.html?r=RSS
Wednesday April 23 2008

Coccolithophores are microscopic marine plants that convert carbon dioxide into chalk. It was thought that rising C02 and more acid oceans would curb their activity. Instead they are booming - and fighting global warming.
For hundreds of millions of years, marine creatures of all shapes, sizes and descriptions have gone about the daily business of converting calcium ions dissolved in seawater into the hard shells and skeletons that are so reminiscent of a trip to the seaside. Many of these shell-makers are tiny life forms that die in their billions each day, falling to the seabed to form what will eventually become another geological layer of rock. Without them we wouldn't have the White Cliffs of Dover, Chartres Cathedral or any of the other limestone wonders of the world.The chemistry behind the process of shell-making, called marine calcification, relies on a complex series of chemical equations kept in a state of equilibrium - balancing acts that can be tipped in either direction. The big question for science is trying to understand how rising levels of man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can affect these chemical equilibria and, ultimately, the ability of these organisms to carry on making their shells and skeletons.
There is a lot at stake in being able to answer this question. Marine calcification is vital for coral reefs and fundamental to the key organisms at the base of the food chain on which all other sea creatures depend.
But it is also important in terms of answering the wider questions of climate change. This is because the chemical process by which these organisms convert calcium ions into shells is central to knowing how the oceans will - or will not - continue to act as a "carbon sink" that helps to soak up man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The latest effort in this field suggests that there will be no simple solution to the problem. Scientists have found that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may affect shell-making creatures in different ways. Some may find it harder to carry out calcification, whereas others may actually find it easier.
Scientists have already estimated that some 118 billion tons of carbon released into the air as carbon dioxide between 1800 and 1994 have been taken up by the oceans worldwide. Indeed, about a third of the carbon dioxide produced by human activities since the start of the Industrial Revolution has been absorbed by the seas. So, without the capacity of the ocean to act as a natural carbon sink, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air today - about 380 parts per million - would be significantly, and dangerously higher.
Marine calcification actually produces carbon dioxide in the short term, but in the long term it takes carbon out of the atmosphere, for example by the formation of limestone rock deposits on the seabed. Indeed, marine calcification is estimated to be the biggest carbon sink on earth over geological timescales by forming layers of calcium carbonate, the basic ingredient of chalk, limestone and marble. And one of the most important organisms that performs the task is the coccolithophore, a microscopic plant that exudes exquisitely formed calcium "plates" around its cell wall. Coccolithophores may be among the smallest and most insignificant members of the shell-making ocean community, but these tiny photosynthetic organisms play a critical role in banking huge amounts of carbon by growing in huge numbers. Indeed, coccolithophore "blooms" are so big they can even be seen from space.
Coccolithophores need carbon dioxide dissolved in seawater for photosynthesis, and bicarbonate ions, in equilibrium with carbon dioxide, to build their calcium shells. But it was assumed that too much carbon dioxide would jeopardise the delicate balance of this two-way chemical reaction.
The oceans are naturally alkaline, but as more carbon dioxide dissolves in the sea to form carbonic acid, the water's acidity increases and there is evidence to suggest that many marine organisms find it difficult to make their shells when ocean acidity increases beyond a certain point. (The sea doesn't actually become "acidic", which means its pH is less than seven - it just becomes less alkaline.)
Not so, it seems, with the coccolithophore, or at least with the most abundant species, called Emiliania huxleyi. The latest study into this species shows that it appears to thrive on high levels of carbon dioxide. Instead of finding it difficult to make its calcium carbonate plates, as some scientists had expected, the organism can, in fact, make bigger and bigger plates as carbon dioxide concentrations are increased artificially, according to a study published in the current issue of the journal Science.
Debora Iglesias-Rodriguez, a biological oceanographer at the National Oceanographic Centre in Southampton, carried out the experiments by bubbling carbon dioxide into tanks to see how the species would cope with rising levels of the dissolved gas. She found that the single-celled plant actually excreted bigger plates at higher concentrations. In fact, at levels of carbon dioxide in the experiment reaching 750ppm (about double of those today), the calcification rates also doubled compared with the calcification rates of coccolithophores grown at CO2 levels of 280ppm, which is to say, pre-industrial levels.
"Our widely held assumption that the acidification of the oceans causes a decrease in calcification in all coccolithophores needs to be reappraised," says Dr Iglesias-Rodriguez. "Our data reveal that these microscopic organisms have been responding to climate change by increasing the size of the cells and their calcium carbonate plates."
Previous experiments with coccolithophores suggested that as acidity levels increased, calcification would decrease. However, Dr Iglesias-Rodriguez believes this may have been due to the way the experiments were carried out. The scientists simply added acid to the water to mimic the increase in acidity due to dissolved carbon dioxide. Her method was to simulate the more natural process by bubbling the gas through the water until it dissolved. "This work contradicts previous findings and shows, for the first time, that calcification by phytoplankton could double by the end of this century," she says. "This is important because the majority of ocean calcification is carried out by coccolithophores such as Emiliania huxleyi and the amount of calcium carbonate produced at the ocean surface is known to have a direct influence on levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide."
Dr Iglesias-Rodriguez and her colleagues point out that the last time the earth experienced large increases in the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide was 55 million years ago during a period known as the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. It was also a time when coccolithophores were abundant.
Paul Halloran of Oxford University, a co-author of the Science study, says that coccolithophores must have thrived during the recent increase in carbon dioxide since the start of the Industrial Revolution. "Our research has also revealed that, over the past 220 years, coccolithophores increased their mass of calcium carbonate by 40 per cent. These results are in agreement with previous observations of coccolithophores being abundant in a period of ocean acidification 55 million years ago," he adds.
One of the main conclusions of the latest study is that it is no longer easy to make simple assumptions about the relationship between rising carbon dioxide, increasing acidity and the ability of sea creatures to continue making shells and calcium carbonate skeletons. Things are more complicated than had been assumed. "Based on our research, the situation is not clear. There will be winners and losers," says Dr Iglesias-Rodriguez.
Victoria Fabry of California State University in San Marcos, an expert on marine calcification, points out that there are many studies suggesting that organisms that engage in making calcium carbonate shells and skeletons will find life difficult in the coming decades.
"As atmospheric CO2 levels continue to rise, we are embarking on a global experiment with as yet uncertain long-term consequences for many marine calcifers," she says.
The coming century could see carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rising to 600 parts per million and beyond - which is unprecedented in terms of the human timescale on this planet. So the question of how marine calcifers will cope with this change will be critical in terms of whether the earth's oceans will continue to help us to deal with our carbon dioxide emissions.
How shells are formed - Molluscs form shells or exoskeletons by secreting calcium carbonate which forms a hardened coating. But unlike most animal structures, seashells are not made of living cells and are produced outside their host's body.
- Molluscs use a flap of tissue called a mantle, which is located under the shell, to secrete the calcium carbonate and form the shell. The shell's colour and shape varies depending on the rate of growth and the mollusc's diet. So in warmer waters where food is abundant, you'll find thousands of species in different shapes, sizes and colours. While in cold waters where food sources are lacking, most shells lack any colour at all.
- Found across all the world's oceans, seashells are common because they are very effective at converting dissolved calcium carbonate which is abundant in seawater. They vary in size from the massive Tridacna clam of the southwest Pacific which weighs 226kg to the Pythina, a tiny, smooth, translucent clam the size of a grain of rice.



5. Postwoman Catches Falling Baby
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/23/wbaby123.xml
Last Updated: 12:29pm BST 23/04/2008

A postal worker has been credited with saving a one-year-old girl's life by catching her after she fell out of a second-story window in New York.
How about that: More tales of the bizarreLisa Harrell was delivering mail to a house in Albany on Monday when she noticed a baby in a window above the front door. Ms Harrell said the baby dropped into her arms She said the next thing she knew, the baby had fallen into her arms.
When the child's mother realised what happened, she ran outside and grabbed the girl.
The woman thanked Ms Harrell and then ran down the street to her mother's house.
Paramedics checked the baby at the scene but found no injuries.
advertisementNo charges are being filed against the mother, who says she had placed her daughter on a bed that was up against the window.
The mother says her back was turned when her daughter crawled out the open window.



Honorable Mentions:

1. Mother's Diet Influences Infant Sex: High Energy Intake Linked to Conception of Sons
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080422194553.htm
ScienceDaily (Apr. 23, 2008)

New research by the Universities of Exeter and Oxford provides the first evidence that a child's sex is associated with the mother's diet. The study shows a clear link between higher energy intake around the time of conception and the birth of sons. The findings may help explain the falling birth-rate of boys in industrialised countries, including the UK and US.
The study focused on 740 first-time pregnant mothers in the UK, who did not know the sex of their fetus. They were asked to provide records of their eating habits before and during the early stages of pregnancy. They were then split into three groups according to the number of calories consumed per day around the time they conceived. 56% of the women in the group with the highest energy intake at conception had sons, compared with 45% in the lowest group. As well as consuming more calories, women who had sons were more likely to have eaten a higher quantity and wider range of nutrients, including potassium, calcium and vitamins C, E and B12. There was also a strong correlation between women eating breakfast cereals and producing sons.
Over the last 40 years there has been a small but consistent decline, of about one per 1000 births annually, in the proportion of boys being born in industrialised countries, including the UK, the USA and Canada. Previous research has also shown a reduction in the average energy intake in the developed world. The 'obesity epidemic' is largely ascribed to declines in physical activity and differences in food quality and eating habits. There is also evidence that skipping breakfast is now common in the developed world: in the USA, the proportion of adults eating breakfast fell from 86% to 75% between 1965 and 1991.
Dr Fiona Mathews of the University of Exeter, lead author on the paper, said: "This research may help to explain why in developed countries, where many young women choose to have low calorie diets, the proportion of boys born is falling. Our findings are particularly interesting given the recent debates within the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Committee about whether to regulate 'gender' clinics that allow parents to select offspring sex, by manipulating sperm, for non-medical reasons. Here we have evidence of a 'natural' mechanism that means that women appear to be already controlling the sex of their offspring by their diet."
Scientists already know that in many animals, more sons are produced when a mother has plentiful resources or is high ranking. The phenomenon has been most extensively studied in invertebrates, but is also seen in horses, cows and some species of deer. The explanation is thought to lie with the evolutionary drive to produce descendants.
Dr Fiona Mathews said: "Potentially, males of most species can father more offspring than females, but this can be strongly influenced by the size or social status of the male, with poor quality males failing to breed at all. Females, on the other hand, reproduce more consistently. If a mother has plentiful resources then it can make sense to invest in producing a son because he is likely to produce more grandchildren than would a daughter. However, in leaner times having a daughter is a safer bet."
Although sex is genetically determined by fathers, mothers therefore appear able to favour the development of one sex of infant rather than another. The mechanism is not yet understood in mammals, but it is known from IVF research that high levels of glucose encourage the growth and development of male embryos while inhibiting female embryos. In humans, skipping breakfast depresses glucose levels and so may be interpreted by the body as indicating poor environmental conditions and low food availability.
The group of women taking part in the study was representative of the UK average in terms of the weight, health and lifestyle. The findings showed no evidence of a link between a mother smoking and drinking caffeine prior to pregnancy and the gender of her baby. There was also no correlation between the body mass index (BMI) of a mother and the sex of her child. Although this research provides the first link between a human mother's diet and the sex of her offspring, there is still no evidence that diet during pregnancy, rather than around the time of conception, plays any role in the sex of a fetus.
This research was published April 23, 2008 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
This study was funded by the Sir Jules Thorn Charitable Trust.


2. Gorilla Population Up 24 Years After Genocide
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89850129&ft=1&f=1004
22 April 2008
by Jake Warga
All Things Considered, April 22, 2008

The mountain gorilla is one of the world's most endangered species. During the Rwandan genocide in 1994, the gorillas' human security was gone so they were under threat of poachers. They also weren't having children.
The gorillas felt the stress the country was under. One theory holds they had become so habituated to people that when they stopped coming, they actually got depressed.
Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo have gotten together to help protect the gorillas. Today, there are 260 mountain gorillas inside Rwanda, and their numbers are increasing.



2. Shakira Lobbies Congress on Education for Poor
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89844556&ft=1&f=1004
Erin Killian, NPR
All Things Considered, April 22, 2008

The hip-shaking Colombian pop star Shakira was in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday for an unlikely reason.
She wasn't here to put on a concert, but rather to lobby Congress to endorse bipartisan legislation that would help pay for education for the 72 million children worldwide who are too poor to go to school.
The bill, known as the Education for All Act, was introduced a year ago by Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) as well as Reps. Nita Lowry (D-N.Y.) and Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.). It would increase U.S. funding for universal education incrementally from the current level of $465 million to $3 billion by 2012.
Shakira tells NPR's Robert Siegel that it would be smart politically for U.S. senators and representatives to put muster behind the bill.
"If this bill passes in Congress, the U.S. will be taking a very strong leadership on the issue of universal education," says the 31-year-old singer. "And it will be transforming the lives of millions and millions of kids around the globe."
Shakira is the chairwoman of Education Action Week, which is organized by the Global Campaign for Education. But her work on behalf of the poor is not a new passion. Thirteen years ago, she started the Barefoot Foundation, which aims to help impoverished Colombian children and those who have been displaced by violence.
"I grew up in a country where unfortunately education is sometimes seen as a luxury, as a privilege, and not as a human right," she says. "This always bothered me. So this is personal to me. In the developing world, people who are born poor will die poor, and that is because of the lack of opportunities, opportunities that come from education. Education can actually save lives."
Shakira says money is needed worldwide to hire qualified teachers; provide children with school meals, textbooks and uniforms; and abolish school fees.
"These things are tools that go hand and hand with education," she says. "A kid cannot learn with an empty stomach."



3. It Doesn't Have Sex and Should be Extinct – So How Come this Fish is Thriving?
http://news.scotsman.com/world/It-doesn39t-have-sex-and.4008899.jp
Date: 23 April 2008
By Hilary Duncanson

A TINY fish that has survived for 70,000 years without reproducing sexually is swimming against the evolutionary tide, new research has found.
Scientists have shown that the Amazon Molly is defying some laws of evolution by avoiding extinction.
Researchers believe the fish may be employing special genetic survival "tricks", and they are now trying to understand more about how the speciesADVERTISEMENThas managed to stay alive.
Amazon Molly fish, all of which are female, interact sexually with males of other species to trigger their reproduction process.
The males' sperm sparks the development of an embryo, but none of the male DNA is actually passed on to the offspring. Only the mother's genes are inherited.
Typically, when creatures reproduce asexually, harmful changes creep into their genes over many generations.
The species will eventually have problems reproducing and can often fall victim to extinction.
Scientists at the University of Edinburgh have been studying complex mathematical models on a highly powerful computing system to look at the case of the Amazon Molly.
Researchers calculated the time to extinction for the fish, based on modelling genetic changes over many thousands of generations.
They are now able to say conclusively, for the first time, that the fish ought to have become extinct within the last 70,000 years, based on the current simple models.
Scientists believe the fish, which are still thriving in rivers in south-east Texas and in north-east Mexico, are using special genetic survival "tricks" to help them stay alive.
One theory is that the fish may occasionally be taking some of the DNA from the males that trigger reproduction, in order to refresh their gene pool.
Dr Laurence Loewe, of the university's School of Biological Sciences, said: "What we have shown now is that this fish really has something special going on and that some special tricks exist to help this fish to survive.
"Maybe there is still occasional sex with strangers that keeps the species alive. Future research may give us some answers."
He added that their findings could also help them to understand more about how other creatures operate.
"I think one of the interesting things is that we are learning more about how other species might use these tricks as well," he said. "It might have a more general importance."
The Edinburgh University-led study was carried out in collaboration with the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Now Dr Loewe plans to look for more answers by carrying out further mathematical tests.
His colleague in Austria, Dunja Lamatsch, will continue to analyse the fish in their natural habitats to find out more about how they work.
Their research has been published in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.




5. Chocolate Bar Shown to Lower Cholesterol
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-04/uoia-cbs042108.php
Public release date: 21-Apr-2008
Contact: Phyllis Picklesimer
p-pickle@uiuc.edu
217-244-2827
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The results of a University of Illinois study have demonstrated an effective way to lower cholesterol levels – by eating chocolate bars.
“Eating two CocoaVia dark chocolate bars a day not only lowered cholesterol, it had the unexpected effect of also lowering systolic blood pressure,” said John Erdman, a U. of I. professor of food science and human nutrition.
The study, funded in part by Mars Inc., the company that makes the bars, was published in this month’s Journal of Nutrition.
Erdman attributes the drop in cholesterol numbers (total cholesterol by 2 percent and LDL or “bad” cholesterol by 5.3 percent) to the plant sterols that have been added to the bar and the drop in blood pressure to the flavanols found in dark chocolate.
Erdman says that some people will assume the study is flawed because of Mars’ funding role.
“I know that it was a double-blinded trial that wasn’t skewed toward a particular result,” said Erdman, who chairs the Mars Scientific Advisory Council. “Moreover, the paper was peer-reviewed and published in the Journal of Nutrition, which ranks in the top 10 percent of all the biological science journals.” Mars has spent millions of dollars studying the biological impact of the flavanols found in cocoa beans and learning how to retain their benefits during the refining process, Erdman said.
Forty-nine persons with slightly elevated cholesterol and normal blood pressure were recruited for the study. Those chosen for the double-blind, placebo-controlled, cross-over study began the American Heart Association’s “Eating Plan for Healthy Americans” (formerly the Step 1 diet) two weeks before the study started; then they were divided into two matched groups. Two types of CocoaVia bars were then introduced, one with plant sterols and one without.
While remaining on the AHA diet, participants ate one CocoaVia formulation twice daily for four weeks, then switched to the other bar for an additional four weeks. Blood cholesterol levels, blood pressure, body weight, and other cardiovascular measures were tracked throughout the eight-week study.
“After the participants started the AHA diet, a lot of them began to lose weight, so we had to keep fussing at them to eat more. We didn’t want a weight change because that also lowers cholesterol,” said Ellen Evans, a U. of I. professor of kinesiology and community health and co-author of the study.
“After starting the CocoaVia bars, we saw a marked differential effect on blood cholesterol, with the sterol-containing products doing better than those without sterols,” she said.
A CocoaVia bar contains 100 calories.
Other authors of the study are LeaAnn Carson of the U. of I. and Catherine Kwik-Uribe, research manager of Mars. Dietitian Robin Allen conducted the study under Erdman’s supervision. The work also was supported by a grant from the U. of I.