 We've covered how to prevent the first step of atherosclerosis, decrease the level of bad cholesterol in our blood. What about blocking some of these other steps downstream? Both common and specialty mushrooms inhibit adhesion molecule expression and in vitro binding and monocytes to human aortic endothelial cells in a pro-inflammatory environment. So that means mushrooms may help block both this step and this step. Basically what these researchers at Arizona State did was take the lining of a human artery, soak it overnight with either nothing, the control group, or shiitake mushrooms, criminy mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, maya-take mushrooms, or plain white button mushrooms. Then they took away the mushrooms, washed the artery off, and then added some monocytes before and after inflammation. So what we'd like to see is these bars come down, less monocytic adhesion. So instead of being sucked into the walls of our arteries, they can go off and do their business elsewhere. Which mushroom do you think worked the best? They all worked, but in another victory for this little fungi, plain old cheap white button mushrooms worked the best. And under inflammatory conditions they found the same thing, but shiitake didn't even seem to work much at all. The health implications are that diverse mushrooms, including common specialty mushrooms, can protect against cardiovascular disease by interfering with events that contribute to atherogenesis.