 Lipoprotein A, also known as LpL, is an independent genetic and causal factor for cardiovascular disease and heart attacks. At any level of LDL cholesterol, your risk of heart attacks and strokes is 2 to 3-fold higher when LpL is elevated. With a high enough level, atherosclerosis continues to progress even if you get your LDL cholesterol way down, which may help explain why so many people continue to have heart attacks and strokes even under treatment for high cholesterol. So it's suggested that doctors test lipoprotein A levels in a patient who suffered such an event if it can't otherwise be easily explained. What's the point of checking it, though, if there's not much we can do about it? To date, no drug to reduce circulating LpL levels has ever been approved for clinical use. Some researchers blame our lack of knowledge on the fact that LpL is not found in typical lab animals like rats and mice. It's only found two places in nature, primates and hedgehogs. How strange is that? No wonder LpL is an enigmatic protein that has mystified medical scientists ever since it was first discovered a half century ago. But who needs mice when you have men? The level in our bloodstream is primarily determined by genetics. And for the longest time, LpL was not thought much influenced by things such as diet. Given it's similar to LDL, though, one might assume a healthy lifestyle would help. However, the evidence has been lacking, but maybe that's because they've not yet tried a plant-based diet. We've known for years that the trans fats found in meat and dairy just as bad as the industrial-produced trans fat found in partially hydrogenated oil junk food, when it came to raising LDL cholesterol. When it comes to lipoprotein A, the meat and dairy trans fat appears to be even worse. Just cutting out meat, putting people on a lacto-oval vegetarian diet does not appear to help, but put people on a whole food plant-based diet packed with a dozen servings of fruits and vegetables a day and within four weeks, lipoprotein A levels dropped 16%. Of course, in those 30 days, they also lost 15 pounds, but weight loss does not appear to affect LpL levels, so you figure it must have been due to the diet. Now, if you're already eating a healthy plant-based diet and your LpL levels are still too high, are there any particular foods that can help, like for cholesterol? Even if the average total cholesterol, those eating strictly plant-based, may be right on target at less than 150 with an LDL right on target at under 70. There's a bell curve, with a plus or minus 30 falling immediately on both sides. Enter the portfolio diet. It's not just plant-based, but at specific cholesterol-lowering foods, if that's not enough. So like nuts and beans, oatmeal and berries, to drag cholesterol down even further. What about LpL? Nuts have been put to the test. Two and a half ounces of almonds every day dropped levels, but only about 8%. That's better than the other studies on nuts that found no effect at all. No effect at all, and no effect at all. Nuts. There is one plant, though, that appears to drop LpL levels 20% enough to take people exceeding the US cutoff down to more optimal level. And that plant is a fruit. Amlica aficionalis, otherwise known as amla, Indian gooseberries. A randomized double-blind placebo-controlled study asking smokers before and after about their cough, their shortness of breath, the loss of appetite, and feelings of impending doom, palpitations, sleep deprivation, irritability, heartburn, and tiredness, as well as objective measurements from their blood count, cholesterol DNA damage to antioxidant status, lung function, and the amla extract they used showed a significant improvement compared to placebo in all the parameters tested with no reports of side effects. That's unbelievable. No, really, that's unbelievable. And indeed, it's completely not true. Yes, subjective complaints got better in the amla group, but they got better in the placebo group, too, with arbitrary scoring systems and no statistical analysis whatsoever. And of the two dozen objective measures, only half could be said to reach any kind of even before and after statistical significance, and only three were significant enough to account for the fact that if you measure two dozen things, a few things might pop up positive if only by chance. Anytime you see this kind of spin in the abstract, which is sometimes the only part of the study people read, you suspect some kind of conflict of interest. But there were no conflicts of interest declared, but that's bulls**t, as the study was funded by the very company selling those amla supplements. But anyways, one of those three significant findings was the LP Little A, so it might be worth a trot. I mean, in the context of a plant-based diet, which in addition to the weight loss can dramatically improve blood pressures, even as people cut down on their blood pressure medications, plus a 25-point drop in LDL-Bad cholesterol, plus a 30% drop in C-reactive protein and significant reductions in other inflammatory markers for a systematic cardioprotective effect, all thanks to this single dietary approach.