“With saturated fat widely considered the primary culprit in raising blood serum levels of cholesterol, most experts are far less worried about cholesterol intake from low-fat foods like eggs, shrimp and other shellfish. Although a small fraction of the population may be sensitive to dietary cholesterol, for most people on an otherwise wholesome diet, cholesterol naturally produced by the liver is the main reason for rising serum cholesterol that prompts people like me to control it with a daily statin.”
It amazes me how wrong dietary guidelines have been for decades. That researchers couldn’t have figured out that dietary cholesterol wasn’t the problem. All these decades where people were afraid to eat eggs, and actually ate one of the most insipid foods every imagined, the “egg-white omelet.”
And what else is wrong in the current dietary guidelines? How much have the low fat and high carbs recommendations of the past contributed to the obesity epidemic?
Indeed, it is now widely believed that the fear of fat promulgated decades ago inadvertently led to the current obesity crisis when people seeking low-fat foods turned instead to ones overloaded with carbohydrates…
How can we trust any such guidelines any more? It’s clear that they’re not based on sound research, but either hunches (the cholesterol and fat recommendations), or lobbying (the lack of clear limits on certain things, such as soda).
Source: What’s New in the Dietary Guidelines – The New York Times