Normal bacteria in the human digestive tract turn the plant compounds known as lignins into a compound called enterolactone. A study that followed Finnish men for 10 years shows that those with high blood levels of enterolactone had three times less heart disease than men with low levels of the compound. The research is published in the most recent issue of The Lancet . This association is amazingly strong.
Most vegetables contain a small amount of plant lignins.
Meri Vanharanta, Bsc, lead author of the study, tells WebMD that foods rich in the compound include flaxseed oil and most other seed oils, whole cereals such as rye, seaweeds, and beans such as lentils. Flaxseed oil is available in supplement form in most health food stores. The researchers monitored 2,005 healthy middle-aged Finnish men beginning between 1984 and 1989. Acute heart attacks occurred in 167 subjects by the end of 1996. These cases were matched by age, examination year, and place of residence to control subjects from the same cohort of the Kuopio Ischemic Heart Disease Risk Factor Study.