A Little bit of Deception Makes the Profits Go Up!

A little bit of misinformation, combined with the food industry’s desire for higher profit margins, can have bad consequences with your health.  Take cholesterol, for instance.  More people know their cholesterol levels than the results of any other blood test.  Yet, few really know what their cholesterol numbers mean.  More studies are finding that high cholesterol is notnecessarily a risk factor for heart disease.

Cholesterol isn’t the bad guy the medical community – and pharmaceutical companies – would have you believe (but it does sell a LOT of drugs).  Cholesterol is a fat that’s essential for good health.  You need this waxy fat in order to use hormones and to form and maintain cell walls.  You even need cholesterol to make one of the most important vitamin/hormones of all – vitamin D.

In addition, animal fats including chicken, beef, eggs, and dairy aren’t an evil plot either. This is because of a little known fact to most people, that:

Your body makes 85% of your cholesterol.

You can go on a pretty extreme diet and only lower your cholesterol 5-10% because most of your cholesterol is produced by the liver.

Another misconception about cholesterol is that you need to limit or avoid eggs because they’re high in cholesterol. But the truth is that eggs have another nutrient, called lecithin, which helps your body to use cholesterol correctly.

In fact, another recent study found that people eating three eggs a day only had higher levels of HDL (healthy) cholesterol. This is great news. The only cholesterol you need to control is oxidized LDL.  It turns out that eating eggs may be one way of doing this!

The researchers in this study looked at middle-aged men and women with metabolic syndrome.  They had them consume either three whole eggs or an equivalent amount of egg substitutes daily.  The participants eating the whole eggs were eating twice as much cholesterol as those eating the egg substitutes.  Did it raise their cholesterol?  Here’s what the researchers found:

Lower Your Cholesterol with Eggs!

Those eating the whole eggs didn’t have any effect on total blood cholesterol.  However, it did lower triglycerides and raise HDL cholesterol.  If it raised HDL and didn’t change total cholesterol, then the eggs had to reduce LDL cholesterol, right?  Absolutely!

The researchers found that the whole eggs did reduce the LDL/HDL cholesterol ratio.  Lower LDL cholesterol also means less LDL available to become oxidized.

“Eating egg yolks was actually associated with enhanced health benefits in these high-risk individuals,” explains Dr. Maria Luz Fernandez, lead study author and Professor at the University of Connecticut. “Subjects consuming whole eggs had greater increases in HDL cholesterol and more significant reductions in the LDL/HDL cholesterol ratio than those who ate the cholesterol-free egg substitute.”

In other words, eat your eggs – even if you’re at high-risk for heart disease and heart attacks.  The eggs may actually help you avoid further heart problems.