Make no mistake; high blood levels of cholesterol raise the risk of heart attacks. But despite what you may have been told in the past, high blood cholesterol does not come from eating cholesterol-containing foods. Cholesterol is essential for life. Your body can’t rely on the vagaries of diet for a reliable supply. It makes its own cholesterol. The cholesterol in food is actually hard to digest. Most of it passes right through your digestive tract and out in your stool.
For years we were told to avoid cholesterol-containing foods. How were we mislead?
In the 1960s, researchers discovered that people with high blood cholesterol had increased rates of heart attacks. A lot of foods contain cholesterol, so some scientists assumed–without proof–that high blood cholesterol comes from eating too many cholesterol-containing foods, such as eggs, meat and dairy products. This assumption proved to be wrong. Your liver determines the level of cholesterol in your blood, and this is mostly genetically determined.
If our cholesterol levels are genetically determined, you might wonder why Mother Nature allowed so many of us to have blood cholesterol levels high enough to cause buildup in our arteries as we age. The fact is that we get our genes from cave dwellers who didn’t live long enough to have to worry about cholesterol buildup. Heart attacks are a disease of modern civilization. As recently as a hundred years ago the main causes of death were infectious diseases, such as pneumonia and tuberculosis. Now we are healthy enough to live long enough to have heart attacks.
The Scientific Advisory Committee to the FDA has now concluded that cholesterol is not a “nutrient of concern,” a striking reversal from previous positions.
Here’s why you should stop worrying about cholesterol. When you try to eliminate one kind of food, you usually end up eating more of another. Sure enough, in the 1970s when Americans started trying to avoid eggs, meat and dairy products, they began consuming more carbohydrates, but not the healthy kind like fruits and vegetables. They started eating more refined carbohydrates–flour products, potatoes, rice and soft drinks–which resulted in accelerating rates of belly fat, obesity and diabetes.
Next Topic: The Difference between “Low Carb” and Low Glycemic Load
