Lowcarbezine!

Why don't you include cholesterol counts with your recipes?

Frequently Asked Question:

Why don't you include cholesterol counts with your recipes?

Simple: I don't want to perpetuate the fiction that cholesterol is something to be avoided. There simply is no good reason to believe that dietary cholesterol causes health problems, and there is at least some reason to consider it beneficial.

You need to understand the difference between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol. There has been, for the past few decades, a belief that high blood cholesterol is a cause of heart disease. That belief is questionable - most people who have heart attacks have never had high blood cholesterol. Renowned heart surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey puts the number of coronary artery disease victims with high blood cholesterol at between 30 and 40%. He has been quoted as saying, "If you say cholesterol is the cause, how do you explain the other 60% to 70% with heart disease who don't have high cholesterol?" Indeed, it's beginning to appear that inflammation is the root cause of the clogging of arteries, with blood cholesterol merely an innocent bystander.

But even if high blood cholesterol is in some way causative in heart disease, there's little evidence that eating cholesterol increases your blood cholesterol. We need cholesterol. It's essential for every cell in our bodies. Cholesterol insulates nerve fibers, maintains cell walls, produces vitamin D, various hormones, and digestive juices. If we eat less cholesterol, we make it in our liver. If we eat more, we make less. It's a clever natural balance.

The reason why a low carbohydrate diet causes a drastic improvement in blood work in most people is that high blood insulin levels can interfere with the body's ability to balance cholesterol production with cholesterol intake, causing runaway production of cholesterol in the liver. When you stop eating a lot of carbohydrates, and your insulin levels drop, your body regains its balance.

There is a minority of people who are "saturated fat responders," producing more cholesterol in response to some kinds of saturated fats, especially hydrogenated vegetable oils, the artificially saturated fats that we were told for so many years were better for us than naturally saturated animal fats like butter and lard, or tropical oils like coconut oil and palm oil. There is a big problem with much of the research, since food questionnaires often lump together commercial baked goods and fried stuff, nearly always made with trans-fat-laden hydrogenated oils, with things like cream, butter, cheese, and eggs, containing natural saturated fats and cholesterol.

But there's little evidence that eating cholesterol increases coronary risk. A 1994 study in the Journal of Internal Medicine looked at 12 men and 12 women, each eating 2 eggs per day for 6 weeks. Their total cholesterol did rise by 4% - but their HDL (good) cholesterol rose by 10% - meaning that their theoretical coronary risk had decreased. In an article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers looked at the Framingham study - the biggest, longest lasting study of heart disease to date. They found no relationship between egg consumption and coronary disease. For that matter, the Framingham Study turned up an interesting but little-mentioned fact: The study showed that those who weighed more and had higher blood cholesterol levels were more at risk for heart disease. Weight gain and cholesterol levels, however, had an inverse correlation with dietary intake of fat and cholesterol. In other words, the more fat and cholesterol subjects ate, the lower their rate of heart disease. Dr. William Castelli, MD, headed the study and had to admit in 1992:

In Framingham, Massachusetts, the more saturated fat one ate, the more cholesterol one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower people's serum cholesterol . . . we found that the people who ate the most cholesterol, ate the most saturated fat, ate the most calories, weighed the least and were the most physically active.

And The Journal of Nutrition ran an article last year showing that even men who had an abnormally strong response to dietary cholesterol stayed within National Cholesterol Education Program Guidelines when adding 640 mgs of egg cholesterol per day to their diets.

On the other hand, as long ago as 1974, a Dr. Kummerow of the University of Illinois published an article called "Nutritional value of Egg Beaters compared with "farm fresh eggs"", detailing a study where he fed some rats lab chow, others real, farm fresh eggs, and still others Egg Beaters "99% real egg!" egg substitute - you know, the ones with no cholesterol. The rat pups fed the lab chow and the rat pups fed the real eggs did fine, while the rat pups fed Egg Beaters developed diarrhea, failed to gain weight properly, and all died within a month of weaning. As the researchers stated: "The general appearance of the rats fed Egg Beaters indicated a gross deficiency in one or more nutritional factors as compared to those fed whole egg." I'd eat the real eggs and brave the cholesterol, if I were you. (Says the girl who had three real eggs for breakfast this morning!)

A study done in Australia looked at the diets of women and children known to have either high, medium, or low blood cholesterol levels. No difference in cholesterol intake was found. (Nor was there a difference in fat or protein intake. I couldn't find information about carbohydrate intake!)

Too, it's important to note that the dramatic rise in heart disease in the 20th Century (and it was dramatic; coronary artery disease was rare before the 1900s) was not accompanied by any increase in dietary cholesterol intake, or, for that matter, animal fat intake. Just the reverse is true - the rise in heart disease came along with the shift from a diet heavy in butter, cream, eggs and lard, to one where those traditional fats were largely replaced with vegetable oils. This is particularly interesting because vegetable oils, and particularly polyunsaturated oils like corn oil, safflower oil, and soy oil, increase inflammation in the body - and inflammation is, you recall, now the most likely culprit in heart disease, not blood cholesterol.

Weighing on the other side is the fact that low cholesterol diets appear to cause depression and violent behavior in lab animals, and at least a tentative link between low cholesterol diets and cognitive problems. This is not surprising, since your brain is largely made of cholesterol. (And if you're pregnant, you really, really shouldn't limit dietary cholesterol - what will your baby make his or her brain from?)

In short, I'm convinced that, while there may be some reason for some people to limit some kinds of saturated fats (and every reason for everybody to completely eliminate hydrogenated oils,) limiting dietary cholesterol isn't good for anyone, and may be a very bad idea. I do not wish to encourage anyone to cut their dietary cholesterol intake, even by default. So I leave cholesterol numbers out of my nutritional breakdowns.

Posted by HoldTheToast at April 1, 2005 01:26 PM