Cholesterol
Cholesterol is essential to life. It's a precursor to key hormones such as testesterone.
Cholesterol is essential to life. It is required to produce some of the most important structures in the body, including cell membranes; hormones such as testosterone, progesterone, estrogen, and cortisol; and bile acids, which are necessary for digesting food. All cells can synthesize their own cholesterol, but some 20 percent of our body's (large) supply is found in the liver, which acts as a sort of cholesterol repository, shipping it out to cells that need it and receiving it back via the circulation. - Outlive
Dietary Cholesterol
Cholesterol that we eat does not have much to do with how much cholesterol we have in our blood.
Another major misconception about heart disease is that it is somehow caused by the cholesterol that we eat in our diet. According to this dated and simplistic view, eating cholesterol-rich foods causes the so-called bad cholesterol to accumulate in our blood and then build up on our artery walls, as if you poured bacon grease down the kitchen drain every time you made a breakfast. Sooner or later, your sink will back up.
The humble egg, in particular, was singled out in a 1968 proclamation by the American Heart Association, accused of causing heart disease because of its high cholesterol content. It has remained in nutritional purgatory for decades, even after reams of research papers showing that dietary cholesterol (and particularly egg consumption) may not have much to do with heart disease at all. Eating lots of saturated fat can increase levels of atherosclerosis-causing lipoproteins in blood, but most of the actual cholesterol that we consume in our food ends up being excreted out our backsides. The vast majority of the cholesterol in our circulation is actually produced by our own cells. Nevertheless, US dietary guidelines warned Americans away from consuming foods high in cholesterol for decades, and nutrition labels still inform American consumers about how much cholesterol is contained in each serving of packaged foods. - Outlive
Even Ancel Keys, the famed nutrition scientist who was one of the founding fathers of the notion that saturated fat causes heart disease, knew this was nonsense. The problem he recognized was that much of the basic research into cholesterol and atherosclerosis had been conducted in rabbits, which have a unique ability to absorb cholesterol into their blood from their food and form atherosclerotic plaques from it; the mistake was to assume that humans also absorb dietary cholesterol as readily. “There’s no connection whatsoever between cholesterol in food and cholesterol in blood,” Keys said in a 1997 interview. “None. And we’ve known that all along. Cholesterol in the diet doesn’t matter at all unless you happen to be a chicken or a rabbit.
It took nearly two more decades before the advisory committee responsible for the US government dietary guidelines finally conceded (in 2015) that “cholesterol is not a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.” Glad we settled that. - Outlive
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Cholesterol from food
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