[jerf]

These are not contradictions. The best evidence is that eating cholesterol doesn't matter. It's your diet that controls how much and what kind of cholesterol is generated by your body, and that's what may or may not be a problem.

As I understand it, it hasn't been terribly well demonstrated that simply lowering cholesterol, usually with drugs, actually reduces any risk either; this remains conjecture despite the amount of cholesterol-reducing drugs in use. The "bad" and "good" cholesterols we've heard about seem to be fairly firmly correlated with bad heart health, but causation has not yet been established, unless there's been some fresh research I haven't heard about, which is very possible.