I found out pretty quickly that there’s a product on the market called Benecol Smart Chews. You can buy 120 of them at that link for $28.99 at the time of this publishing. There might be more options available, but I chose this product because it was the first that I found.

Looking at Benecol Smart Chews, each chew has 0.85g of plant stanol esters. That makes Benecol Smart Chews $0.24 for 0.85g of plant stanols.

It’s worth comparing that to MonaVie Pulse. On one website (that I won’t mention here), I saw the market price for MonaVie Pulse to be $45.25. However, they were having a sale and a single bottle was $37.25. One bottle of MonaVie Pulse is around 25 ounces (750ml). According to MonaVie’s approved claims “Two servings of MonaVie Pulse juice (4 oz) supply 0.8g of plant sterols.” So one bottle (25 ounces) provides 6 servings (4oz) which are each 0.8g of plant sterols. At the SALE price per bottle, MonaVie Pulse is about $6.21 per 0.8g of plant sterols.

It looks like Benecol is the clear winner as I’d much rather spend $0.24 for slightly more cholesterol fighting power than MonaVie Pulse’s $6.21 price. However, I should note that the website selling MonaVie Pulse did have a bulk purchase option. If you wanted to spend $232, you could get 8 bottles of MonaVie Pulse… $29 a bottle. Even in this amount of bulk purchasing it is $4.83 per 0.8g of plant sterols. I don’t want to think about the costs of shipping 8 bottles that have to be added to that. I’d still rather pay the $0.24 with the free shipping from Amazon.

Plant Stanol Esters vs. Plant Sterol Esters

One thing that you might have noticed above is that one is plant stanols and the other is plant sterols. The stanol/sterol thing was confusing to me at first, but it seems that both are effectively the same in reducing cholesterol to the point where the same cholesterol claims can be legally made.

If you are looking for to lower your cholesterol through the use food, the choose is clear… Benecol Smart Chews are the way to go.

Originally posted 2010-02-07 03:43:55.