I just finished reading Dr. Jonny Bowden’s revised new edition of Living Low Carb. It is an excellent book that covers a lot of reasons why reducing carb intake, and improving carb sources, will go a long way to maximizing your health. He also busts some myths, gives supplement advice, and analyzes popular low-carb diets (he gave Cassandra Forsythe-Pribanic, a friend and colleague of mine, the top recommendation for her wonderful book Women’s Health Perfect Body Diet).
In Living Low Carb Dr. Bowden throws out some awesome information that really helps to show why the intense focus on saturated fat, cholesterol and heart disease is misguided. Today we are going to focus more on the dietary cholesterol side of things.
He references the enormous and long-term Framingham Heart Study, one of the largest studies ever undertaken to prove the point.
This data clearly shows, from hundreds of thousands of people, that on average, dietary cholesterol intake had no impact on blood levels of cholesterol. People who ate below the average amount of cholesterol or above it had equal blood cholesterol levels. The body has a negative feedback system. When we consume more cholesterol, we produce less (granted there are people who’s system is broken, but they are the exception, not the rule).
We also have some similar info from another large-scale long-term study, the Tecumseh study.
Oddly enough, or probably not so odd, people in the upper 33% of blood cholesterol levels had the lowest cholesterol intake from their diet, showing yet again that dietary cholesterol intake has little to no impact on blood cholesterol levels.
Even Ancel Keys, the misguided creator of all this saturated fat/cholesterol causes heart disease nonsense, stated, in 1991 no less, “There’s no connection whatsoever between cholesterol in food and cholesterol in blood and we’ve known that all along. Cholesterol in the diet doesn’t matter unless you happen to be a chicken or a rabbit.”
Well that statement was only 40 years late and after we had become a nation obsessed with the wrong data, but we seem to finally to heading in the right direction.