Has Cholesterol Been Getting a Bad Press?
Has Cholesterol Been Getting a Bad Press?
We are used to getting conflicting information about what is good or not good for us to eat. But recent news that cholesterol is not bad for us after all certainly got my attention. It turns out that research done in the USA showed that eating foods high in cholesterol like bacon and eggs and butter had very little impact on blood cholesterol levels in about 75% of the population. The remaining 25% of the population are referred to as “hyper-responders”. In this group, there was a moderate increase in both LDL (“bad cholesterol” and HDL (“good cholesterol”), but that did not affect the ratio of LDL to HDL and did not increase the risk of heart disease. Chris Kresser on his blog ‘Health for the 21st Century ‘ was talking about this last year.
He stated that eating cholesterol would not give us a heart attack. He said that people could ditch the egg-white omelettes and start eating yolks again, a good thing, since all of the 13 essential nutrients that eggs contain are found in the yolk. Egg yolks are an especially good source of choline, a B-vitamin that plays important roles in everything from neurotransmitter production to detoxification to maintenance of healthy cells. Studies showed that up to 90% of Americans don’t get enough choline, which can lead to fatigue, insomnia, poor kidney function, memory problems and nerve-muscle imbalances. What about saturated fat? It’s true that some studies show that saturated fat intake raises blood cholesterol levels. But these studies are almost always short-term, lasting only a few weeks. Longer-term studies have not shown an association between saturated fat intake and blood cholesterol levels. In fact, of all of the long-term studies examining this issue, only one of them showed a clear association between saturated fat intake and cholesterol levels, and even that association was weak.
Studies on low-carbohydrate diets (which tend to be high in saturated fat) suggested that they not only don’t raise blood cholesterol, they have several beneficial impacts on cardiovascular disease risk markers.
If you’re wondering whether saturated fat may contribute to heart disease in some way that isn’t related to cholesterol, a large study involving close to 350,000 participants found no association between saturated fat and heart disease. A Japanese prospective study followed 58,000 men for an average of 14 years and found no association between saturated fat intake and heart disease, and an inverse association between saturated fat and stroke (those who ate more saturated fat had a lower risk of stroke).
That said, just as not everyone responds to dietary cholesterol in the same manner, there’s some variation in how individuals respond to dietary saturated fat as well. If we took ten people, fed them a diet high in saturated fat, and measured their cholesterol levels, we’d see a range of responses that averages out to no net increase or decrease.
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Amanda Thomas
UK HEALTH RADIO
