Should You Restrict Your Cholesterol Intake?

Photo by Mikhail Nilov: https://www.pexels.com/photo/food-plate-healthy-dawn-7780792/

One of the “classic” measures of health that people are often concerned about is cholesterol levels. While it’s a complicated topic, high cholesterol in and of itself is not really the big boogeyman that it’s traditionally been made out to be.

The short story is that the main detrimental health effects associated with cholesterol are usually more due to inflammatory processes that damage the walls of blood vessels, creating areas where cholesterol can stick and cause plaques that narrow those blood vessels. Without those inflammatory processes (which can be detected with blood tests – but are often still ignored in favor of cholesterol levels), even cholesterol levels that are quite high don’t usually create major problems.

But I want to focus in on the topic of whether or not you should restrict your intake of dietary cholesterol. For generations, we’ve been taught that dietary cholesterol is bad and that foods like eggs will drive you to an early grave.

The fact of the matter is, that’s simply not true for most people. And the sad part is, this has been known since the 1960’s, yet the powers that be, for a variety of reasons (which typically come down to certain industries with a lot of political clout being able to make lots of money), have allowed the demonization of dietary cholesterol to continue.

Anyway, the vast majority of the cholesterol circulating in your blood is actually produced by your body, specifically by the liver. Cholesterol is a critical component of every cell in your body without which your cells (and pretty soon afterwards, you) would actually die! Cholesterol is also a vital component of most hormones, without adequate quantities of which you would feel so bad that you would probably want to die!

I’ve heard of more than one case in which someone with completely normal cholesterol levels and no other risk factors was prescribed a cholesterol-lowering statin drug on a “preventive basis”, to which I inquire, “To prevent what - a good quality of life?”

Getting too low on your cholesterol level is definitely not a good thing!

Getting back to what effects blood levels, except for a very small number of people with genetically altered cholesterol metabolism, 10% or less of the cholesterol consumed in the diet actually finds its way into your bloodstream. The other 90%, as mentioned a moment ago, is produced in your liver.

There’s a number of things that influence the liver’s production and recirculation of cholesterol, but cholesterol intake has a very minimal effect in most situations.

Besides hereditary factors that you have no control over, the big factors tend to be stress, smoking, excess alcohol consumption, certain medications (especially hormones like birth control) and diet.

But wait! Diet?! Didn’t I just say in effect that dietary cholesterol doesn’t matter?

Dietary cholesterol by and large doesn’t matter, but there are two other dietary factors (besides alcohol, that hopefully you don’t consume so much of that you consider it a part of your diet) that do significantly impact your cholesterol levels.

Saturated fat is known to result in increased production of cholesterol by the liver. Because of this, and because foods high in saturated fat are often also high in cholesterol, there’s been a tendency to group the two together in the recommendation to “limit saturated fat and cholesterol.” But it’s actually the saturated fat that’s potentially problematic, not the cholesterol.

Saturated fat increases cholesterol levels in the blood, but many experts now agree that there’s actually a bigger villain in not only elevating cholesterol levels, but increasing the potential for the aforementioned inflammatory effects that result in blood vessel plaques.

Refined carbohydrates, especially sugar and any carbs that are rapidly broken down into sugars (such foods made with refined wheat or corn), not only cause the liver to produce more cholesterol, but they promote inflammation and metabolic disorders like diabetes (which also contributes dramatically to high cholesterol and arterial plaquing).

So, while you probably won’t get that much benefit from restricting your cholesterol intake, it would be a good idea to limit sugar and refined carbs – not just for the sake of maintaining healthy cholesterol, but for a variety of health promoting effects.

The importance of limiting saturated fat intake is still a subject of much controversy and conflicting research, so it might very well turn out to be an individual thing – with some people doing better to significantly restrict saturated fats in the diet, while others might be healthier taking in more saturated fat in favor of restricting carbs.

After all, we do have to eat something and if you reduce one source of energy (fats, carbohydrates, and protein), you will naturally wind up consuming more of something else. Sometimes a bit of experimentation is needed to find what works best for you.

So if you’re an egg lover, you don’t need to hold back on them – although you might want to moderate the bacon and/or toast with jelly that you have with them!

Until next time…

George F. Best, D.C.