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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

This concept should be extended to adults and should include starches and not just sugar.

A few years back I dropped to <100g of carbs per day (excluding fibre) and went from 70kg to 61kg and have stayed that way for years.

All the research shows cholesterol and fat has nothing to do with heart disease. The leading factor in heart disease is inflammation, and excess sugar damages the arteries causing inflammation. Cholesterol build up is a result of your body constantly trying to repair the damage caused by excess sugar.

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"All the research" and "nothing to do with" are both huge oversimplifications / exaggerations of what otherwise might be a good point.

Then you should provide a citation. Here's a quote from the Harvard health blog[1]:

"A summary of the committee’s December 2014 meeting says “Cholesterol is not considered a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.” Translation: You don’t need to worry about cholesterol in your food.

"Why not? There’s a growing consensus among nutrition scientists that cholesterol in food has little effect on the amount of cholesterol in the bloodstream. And that’s the cholesterol that matters."

[1] http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/panel-suggests-stop-warni...

Well, the discussion was not about cholesterol, but about fat in general, about which the blog writes

> A better focus is on reducing saturated fat and trans fat in the diet, which play greater roles in damaging blood vessels than dietary cholesterol.

Cholesterol in food is not what almost anybody has been concerned about for the last twenty years. Cholesterol produced in the blood as a result of saturated fat intake, or as a consequence of lipid metabolism in the face of tonically elevated glucose load, is another matter.

Anyway, a starting point for your literature review on a contrary school of thought (which is, at present, the dominant school of thought) can be found at the American Heart Association [1].

[1] http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/HealthyLiving/HealthyEating/Nu...

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