Paul,
Well, I did some Googling around, and the medical opinion seems pretty unanimous:
Quote:
Dietary cholesterol does influence the level of plasma cholesterol, although its effect is much less than that of the amount and the nature of dietary fatty acids
Quote:
For most people, the amount of cholesterol eaten has only a modest impact on the amount of cholesterol circulating in the blood. (17) For some people, though, blood cholesterol levels rise and fall very strongly in relation to the amount of cholesterol eaten. For these "responders," avoiding cholesterol-rich foods can have a substantial effect on blood cholesterol levels.
Why does this confusion arise? Well, because of typical health media stupidity:
Quote:
The problem arose years ago when sections of the food industry decided the public would not be able to understand the fact that the body can make excess cholesterol when the diet is high in saturated fat. Instead of telling the public how much saturated fat foods contained, they chose to highlight cholesterol, tagging food labels with the words ‘no cholesterol’. To compound this absurdity, most of the foods that bore this claim had never contained cholesterol (e.g. olive oil) and many had high levels of saturated fat.
More charitably, the reason the American Heart Association recommends against dietary cholesterol is that while it may not the the primary source of blood cholesterol, they believe that it has no nutritional value. As a result, recommending reduction is easy for them to do:
Quote:
Typically the body makes all the cholesterol it needs, so people don't need to consume it. Saturated fatty acids are the main culprit in raising blood cholesterol, which increases your risk of heart disease. Trans fats also raise blood cholesterol. But dietary cholesterol also plays a part. The average American man consumes about 337 milligrams of cholesterol a day; the average woman, 217 milligrams.
Anyway, I cannot find
any source backed by a study citation which claims that dietary cholesterol has a greater effect on blood cholesterol than fats do for the majority of the population. So I think my "misconfection" stands.
Links:
http://www.healthyeatingclub.org/info/a ... sterol.htmhttp://www.americanheart.org/presenter. ... ifier=4488http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionso ... index.htmlhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18203890