Common Misconfections

Da Bull Man · **Posted:** Fri Jan 07, 2011 9:47 am

Hasn't CI threatened lawsuits to those they percieve to be copying their recipes? Perhaps an attempt to sink the "ship of fools?"

Amy · **Posted:** Fri Jan 07, 2011 9:55 am

Da Bull Man wrote:

Hasn't CI threatened lawsuits to those they percieve to be copying their recipes? Perhaps an attempt to sink the "ship of fools?"

Have they?! I think the likes of well published chefs could turn that one right back on them.

I truly am shocked if BCP has done that.

Amy

Paul Kierstead · **Posted:** Fri Jan 07, 2011 10:03 am

TheFuzzy wrote:

7. We do not get blood cholesterol by consuming cholesterol in foods. Most people's blood cholesterol is raised due to eating saturated fats in foods. Since all foods which have cholesterol also have saturated fats (although not vice-versa), the confusion is natural.

I'm not picking a fight here; I'm interested as it is fairly relevant to me. My understanding, as of my reading, is that the effect of dietary cholesterol was "unknown", with studies seeming to go both ways.

Is there later good research confirming that it doesn't have an effect (which seems instinctively right)?

Amy · **Posted:** Fri Jan 07, 2011 10:28 am

Well, I'm not likely to again trust any study reported in the Lancet any time soon. (Funny, but totally not...)

Amy

TheFuzzy · **Posted:** Sat Jan 08, 2011 1:58 pm

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.htm
http://www.americanheart.org/presenter. ... ifier=4488
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionso ... index.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18203890

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Common Misconfections

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