The Cholesterol in Your Food Doesn’t Matter

This is where I might seem to be contradicting myself a bit. You know I said cholesterol in food doesn’t matter? Well, it does if you eat a lot of cholesterol in combination with a lot of saturated fat.

Let’s say you like to pound steak. Most red meats typically contain a lot of saturated fat and a significant amount of cholesterol, so when you eat them regularly, you typically see an increase in LDL cholesterol.

The good news is that saturated fat-laden steak also raises your HDL cholesterol, so your ratio of total cholesterol to HDL (a putative marker of cardiovascular disease) isn’t altered.

So, in general, high-cholesterol foods that don’t contain much saturated fat, such as eggs and shrimp, won’t affect LDL cholesterol levels, but foods high in cholesterol and saturated fat, such as steaks and other cuts of red meat will.

However, as noted, red meat shouldn’t affect your long-term cardiovascular health because it doesn’t seem to affect your LDL/HDL ratio. So the question is, should you be eating steak, burgers and such with impunity?

Research is sometimes confusing. A 1991 study, funded by the US Surgeon’s Office, found that if Americans reduced the amount of saturated fat they ate, they could delay 42,000 deaths each year, please, by an average of two weeks.

That’s not as bad as it sounds because “average” means that some people may have extended their lives by several years, while others may have extended their lives long enough that their Hot Pockets are done heating in the microwave.

But even so, any lengthening of life probably had little to do with cholesterol itself.