Eating Bananas Every Day Has An Unexpected Effect On Your Cholesterol – Health Digest

High cholesterol affects millions of Americans, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And that’s not a fact to take lightly. The higher your cholesterol levels soar — especially your low-density lipoprotein (LDL) or so-called “bad” cholesterol levels — the greater your risk of developing cardiovascular disease.

How can you lower your cholesterol? For starters, you may want to talk with your provider about the value of taking cholesterol-fighting medications. Afterward, you might want to consider adding cholesterol-busting foods to your diet, including bananas.

When consumed regularly or even daily, bananas may help bring down your LDL cholesterol levels, providing you with a welcome, albeit unexpected effect in exchange for a natural sweet treat. And bananas aren’t exactly light on nutrition, either. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that one medium-sized banana provides you with more than 3 grams of fiber, 5.9 milligrams of calcium, 422 milligrams of potassium, and an abundance of vitamin C, folate, and vitamin A — all for just 105 calories. That means you could tackle your LDL cholesterol without giving up on a tasty snack or add-in ingredient.

Just how potent are bananas as a natural cholesterol-reducing tool? Recent research suggests that bananas are more than just promising — they’re potentially predictive when it comes to scrubbing away unwanted cholesterol from the body and helping you fight against arterial cholesterol buildup. (You can thank bananas’ fiber content for their cleansing abilities, says Healthline.)

In one 2023 study published by the Middle East Research Journal of Biological Sciences, 40 rickshaw drivers were asked to eat a banana in the morning, in the middle of the day, and at night. After two weeks of the banana-heavy diet, their cholesterol levels had decreased noticeably. At the start of the experiment, the drivers’ mean total cholesterol levels were 178.57. By the end of the study, the drivers’ mean total cholesterol average had dropped to 124.35.

Another study from 2019 in Nutrition & Food Science showed similarly positive results, though it evaluated the unexpected effects of banana flour on research animals rather than banana fruit on human subjects. In the study, rats were fed concentrations of unripe banana flour. The rats who ate the lowest (10%) concentration of banana flour excreted more cholesterol than they had previously. Those findings led researchers to conclude that banana flour at low concentrations could play a part in helping lower cholesterol. Again, the study focused on rats and not human beings. Regardless, the study outcome offered a compelling argument for eating bananas.

In addition to possibly being a cholesterol-reducing food, bananas may improve your health in other ways as well. For example, you might find it easier to lose weight if you indulge in bananas instead of other kinds of sweets. Obese men who ate bananas daily in a 2023 study from Health Biotechnology and Biopharma experienced both BMI and body weight reductions.

You might also discover that bananas help you bring down your blood pressure. That’s what happened to the elderly participants in a study published by Nusantara Science and Technology Proceedings in 2024. The participants who ate bananas and watermelon were able to bring down their blood pressure numbers without the use of pharmaceuticals.

This doesn’t mean that bananas alone can treat high cholesterol, excess weight, or hypertension, or that they’re always the healthiest food choice. For instance, you may want to monitor your banana intake if you’re trying to avoid overloading on carbohydrates or sugars. As Healthline reporting reveals, a medium banana will set you back about 15 grams of sugar. Therefore, if you have type 1 or type 2 diabetes you may want to explore a different food that could assist you in moderating and managing your total and LDL cholesterol levels.