Make no mistake; high blood levels of cholesterol raise the risk of heart attacks. If you have high blood cholesterol should talk to a doctor about it, However, despite what you may have been told in the past, high blood cholesterol does not come from eating cholesterol-containing foods. Actually, the cholesterol in food is hard to digest. Most of it passes right through your digestive tract and out in your stool. Cholesterol is essential for life. Your body can’t rely on the vagaries of your diet for a reliable supply, so it makes its own cholesterol.
For years we were told to avoid cholesterol-containing foods. How were we misled? 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 makes most of the cholesterol in your blood. How much it produces is mainly genetically determined. The Scientific Advisory Committee to the FDA has concluded that cholesterol is not a “nutrient of concern,” a reversal from previous positions.
You might wonder why Mother Nature allowed so many of us to have cholesterol levels high enough to cause buildup in our arteries. We got our genes from cave dwellers who didn’t live long enough for cholesterol to buildup in their arteries. The main causes of death were starvation, injuries and infections. Heart attacks are a disease of modern civilization. Now we live long enough to have heart attacks.
There’s a good reason not to avoid 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 kinds 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, polycystic ovary disease and diabetes.
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