RESEARCH Effects of dietary compon

Full list of author information is available at the end of the articleBackground The strong inverse association between measures of high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) and cardiovas-cular disease risk [1] has recently prompted several stud-ies to establish the role of HDL-C in the causal pathway of atherosclerosis and its resulting end-organ damage. However, in both clinical trials [2,3] and Mendelian randomization analyses [4], increasing HDL-C levels has failed to demonstrate a significant decrease in cardiovas-cular disease, raising doubts as to the cardioprotective nature of the HDL-C and the high density lipoprotein particle (HDL-P) in its entirety. However, recent evidence from the Multi Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) suggests that aspects of the HDL-P not measured by HDL-C may be responsible for the cardioprotective effects of HDL [5]. In this work, Mackey et al. studied a cohort of 5,598 participants, measured both HDL-P (which reflects the total quantit