Health food fans have long extolled the virtues of soy, but now a study may convince more Americans to use soy as something more than a sauce on their Chinese dinner.

The study, reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine, suggests that eating more soy foods, particularly those rich in compounds called isoflavones, may lead to dramatic drops in cholesterol, which helps clogs the arteries and contributes to heart disease.

A research team from Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., found that people who consumed soy products with the greatest amounts of plant estrogens or isoflavones displayed substantial drops in LDL cholesterol (low-density lipoprotein, which is commonly called bad cholesterol) and total cholesterol levels in just nine weeks.

The more isoflavones the soy product has, the greater the effects on cholesterol, according to the authors. Isoflavones are particularly good candidates for the cardioprotective effects of soy because of their many chemical and biological similarities to mammalian estrogen, lead author Dr. John R. Crouse III said in a press release.

In the study, 156 healthy men and women with elevated cholesterol levels followed a standard low-cholesterol diet plus either an isoflavone-free protein or soy protein, ranging from as little as 3 milligrams to as much as 62 milligrams if isoflavones per day for nine weeks. People with the highest cholesterol levels and ate soy with the highest milligrams of isoflavones lowered their overall cholesterol by 9 percent and LDL by 10 percent.

More than half of the United States population has high or borderline high cholesterol. The average cholesterol level in the United States is in the 200 to 240 range, according to the American Heart Association. In China, the average cholesterol level is about 120 and the risk of coronary heart disease is about 5 percent of what it is in the United States.

The average Asian eats enough soy to get about 30 milligrams to 50 milligrams of isoflavones daily.

If tofu isn't for you, there are other ways to increase your soy intake and, at the same time, disguise it into something flavorful. Try a soy burger or a soy shake, which uses soy milk (liquid pressed from soybeans that have been soaked and pureed). Soy burgers and tofu hot dogs have isoflavones but in smaller amounts because soy is one of many ingredients.

Dousing your dinner with more soy sauce won't get you anywhere, though. Soy sauce has no isoflavones.