 The ability of phytosterols in plant foods to reduce cholesterol levels was first reported more than 80 years ago. The same trash-picker analogy used to explain the effects of fiber on cholesterol can help us understand how phytosterols and phytostanols work. Just like phytoestrogens in plants have an anti-estrogenic effect by fooling your body into using them instead of our own estrogen, which is 1,000 times stronger, phytosterols are plant-based cholesterol-lookalikes, found predominantly in nuts and seeds. Here's what cholesterol looks like. Here's what a phytosterol looks like. Can you see the difference? When we eat nuts and seeds and phytosterols finding their way into our ever-flowing waste stream, our trash-picker and pterocytes and our gut lining throw them in their bins, along with the actual cholesterol. Their bins can only hold so much, though, before they have to go empty them into our body before coming back to the banks of our fecal flow. And so, if there's cholesterol on the waste stream, that's what loads up the bin. But if there's phytosterols too, half the bin may be filled up with cholesterol and half with phytosterols, leaving the other half's worth of cholesterol to flush out to sea. Meanwhile, our body gets those phytosterols absorbed and says, what am I supposed to do with these plant molecules and chucks them back down the trash chute where trash pickers further down the line may accidentally pick them back up again and repeat the process. So in the end, or out the end, because we swallowed all these phytosterols into our gut, less excess cholesterol gets reabsorbed and it ends up getting dumped. This shows the increased fecal excretion of both dietary and endogenous cholesterol when one eats a phytosterol-rich diet.