Selenium may help against cholesterol

modest boost in “good” cholesterol, a new British study reveals.
The finding comes from a six-month examination of the impact of various dosages of the supplement on the cholesterol levels of healthy people in England.
“The issue is that there have been an awful lot of studies, about eight, that have looked at blood cholesterol, both good and bad, and have found an association with high blood selenium,” said study author Margaret P Rayman, a professor of nutritional medicine at the University of Surrey in Guildford, England.
But an association is only that; it doesn’t mean one thing causes another.
“So we looked for whether selenium actually causes cholesterol to rise, and we definitively found that there wasn’t an adverse effect.
“In fact, we can safely and confidently say that, if anything, selenium had a slightly beneficial effect,” Rayman said.
However, the safety of selenium has not been studied, and the authors said the findings weren’t significant enough to recommend supplementation of the trace mineral.
They also noted that the results can’t necessarily be applied to Americans, because of differences in the food supply and diets of each country. – HealthDay News.