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by sweuder 1244 days ago
Dietary cholesterol has been repeatedly shown to have little to no effect on blood cholesterol or other cardiovascular disease. Ex: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6024687/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9143438/

This article is shallow ad for a drug company.

5 comments

Yeah in a large subset of the population (I think between 50-60% if i'm not mistaken), but then what about the other 40% ? That's the thing with health nutrition, you can't really generalize very well.
Was about to say- dietary cholesterol doesn't matter! Eat those eggs folks
I am not sure about the literature, research is always changing.

Here is another take: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14570396

Your "other take" is about dietary saturated fat and this article is talking about dietary cholesterol.

My take is that dietary cholesterol has little to no effect on blood cholesterol, however dietary saturated fat has a strong effect on blood cholesterol levels and health outcomes. Note that this take is consistent with the current article and the one you linked to.

Besides eggs which seem to have a positive effect, what else is good and what is bad for controlling blood cholesterol? I couldn’t work it out from the articles.
I discovered that I had high cholesterol about 9 months ago. My LDL was 191, when it should be 100 (or lower).

I met with a nutritionist at UCSF who boiled it down to a simple (although not necessarily easy) dietary rule, which is that I could only eat 8 or fewer grams of saturated fat per day. That's the only metric that I've been monitoring, and I've brought my LDL number down to 120 as of my most recent test.

This is all without medication. I will also note that I have been exercising more and lost 30 pounds.

p.s. An egg has ~1.5g saturated fat. So, in my case, I usually eat just egg whites because eating 2 whole eggs for breakfast would put me above the rough estimate of 2.7g per meal (3 meals per day).

Are you me? I recently had 194 LDL-C. I panicked and switched to a plant based diet. About 10 days in I paid for another lab test -- my LDL-C dropped 60 points in 10 days. I've returned to eating some lean meat, but I've learned my lesson about saturated fat.

8 grams is very low. Do you count everything? Do you count nuts? Do you count oatmeal? Do you count potatoes? I was aiming for 5g of saturated fat while only tracking high fat items, but once I logged everything using a diet app I found I got a lot of saturated fat from things like oatmeal. When I really track everything 13g is my current limit, and it's much more reasonable and matches the ADA recommendations.

For the first month, I religiously counted/tracked everything and was regularly below that 8g target.

While I no longer methodically track the data, I remain fastidious with what I eat. For example, "Mush" brand oatmeal is very tasty imo, and it only contains 0.5-1.0g for the flavors that I eat. Like you, I've also added more plant-based foods to my diet. I'm a big fan of "Credo" brand queso, which has 0g due to using cashews as the dairy-substitute.

Statins, fish oil, psyllium husk, and aerobic exercise are good for lowering blood serum cholesterol. An easy dietary change is eating more beans and oatmeal. Avoid foods high in saturated fats, which is generally meats and dairy.
Cholesterol can not stick to artery walls without glucose! People on carnivore and ketogenic diets are some of the healthiest people in our society.
Allow me to introduce to you, gluconeogenesis:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluconeogenesis

People on the ketogenic diet have stable blood sugar levels due to glucogenesis and it's those who eat a lot of carbohydrates that experience fluctuations. High sugar levels can cause it to stick to artery walls like little daggers, and cholesterol then gets stuck there as well on those. The original comment was short and didn't include these details.