THURSDAY, Dec. 11, 2008 (Health.com) — Some people have all the luck. A new study shows that certain individuals with a gene mutation can slurp down milk shakes or other high-fat food and drink without a nasty jump in cholesterol.
It’s almost like being born with a built-in cholesterol-lowering drug. The gene is called APOC3, and researchers found that 5% of the people they studied—who were all Amish, in this case—had the protective mutation, according to the report in Science.
The researchers haven’t tested a lot of people so far, but they think the gene mutation is relatively rare. (The Amish sometimes have higher or lower levels of mutations than those found in the general population.)
They do know that it seems to work by speeding up the breakdown of triglycerides, a type of fat. In the study, Toni Pollin PhD, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, in Baltimore, and colleagues gave 809 members of the Old Order Amish community in Lancaster County, Penn., a super-high-fat milk shake (78% of calories from fat), and then tracked them for the next six hours.
They monitored how volunteers’ arteries coped with the fatty drink and checked for calcium deposits in their coronary arteries, a sign of heart disease.
The researchers tested the participants’ DNA and found that those who coped with the fatty drink better than others had an APOC3 mutation. The mutation carriers had less artery calcification, indicating that they had healthier hearts as well as higher HDL (good cholesterol), and lower triglycerides and LDL (bad cholesterol).
Next: How the discovery might help the rest of us
