You've tried terrible diets. You've tried statin drugs like Lipitor. Now Albuquerque, N.M., twins Heba Naser Aggad and Haya Aggad have a new idea for lowering your cholesterol: apple cider vinegar. Long a home remedy (their grandmother, who lives in the Middle East, kept urging family members to try it), apple cider vinegar contains a substance called pectin, which the twins hypothesized would have a beneficial effect. So, borrowing a lab at Central New Mexico Community College every Friday for several weeks, the 16-year-olds put a few drops in cholesterol blood samples. The "high cholesterol" sample had 500 milligrams per deciliter " more than twice the concentration national U.S. guidelines call "too high." They added one drop and lowered the amount to 499. They added three and took it down to 497. They added 10 and got it down to 489. That's not a huge decrease, but as Heba points out, unlike with Lipitor, "there are no side effects."� Except, of course, to the palate. "It has a bad smell and a really strong taste,"� Heba noted when we spoke to her at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) in Atlanta, Ga. But you can mix it with water, and "it's good with salad dressing."� Even their father-a holdout-agreed to give it a try to combat his high cholesterol. [Text continues after photo] This wasn't exactly a large-scale clinical trial, and the real-life benefits have yet to be proved, but Heba says she and her sister were happy to have helped build evidence that "sometimes home remedies work better than commercialized products."� The twins found two other benefits to their research. For starters, they got to work together (and as sisters, "we could work on it all the time"�) and they got to meet their rather dazzling peers at ISEF. "Seeing all these projects is so cool,"� she says. "You're seeing what's going to make the universe, like, leap ahead."� -- Edited by Christie Nicholson at 05/15/2008 1:01 PM