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Comment by burke | Hacker News Reader

Eggs (yolks) have a load of cholesterol. Watch out for that. IIRC, they're about 200mg each, where a sensible daily limit is 300-400mg.

EDIT: If you want to go all crazy-health-nut, the whites are 100% protein calories (~50/50 fat/protein in the yolks), have no cholesterol, and taste pretty much the same.

EDIT again: But I guess you don't really have much else in the way of fat sources, cheese aside. If you do this long-term, you might want to make sure your blood cholesterol levels don't go nuts.

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If you read the book mentioned in the article, he also talks about how the whole "eating cholesterol is bad" is also a myth and bad science.

Maybe. I've heard a couple people with similar diets wonder why their plasma cholesterol is so high, whether or not it's from the dietary cholesterol. YMMV.

Your anecdotes don't match the research. Consumption of animal products is not much correlated to serum cholesterol. Serum cholesterol in turn is not much correlated to mortality. If anything it's been found that low levels are of greater concern than high levels.

Cholesterol is not really worth measuring. Triglycerides and insulin levels/sensitivity are maybe worth measuring.

Avoiding egg yolks is stupid. All the vitamins and minerals are in the yolk.

Your body makes more than 60% of the cholesterol that you need daily. 500mg of cholesterol are about 1/3 of what you need every day.

http://www.extension.iastate.edu/Publications/NCR332.pdf

Then again, there is evidence that dietary choices affect your blood cholesterol levels and your expected life span. For example, see North Karelia project: http://www.ktl.fi/portal/english/research__people___programs...

These are not contradictions. The best evidence is that eating cholesterol doesn't matter. It's your diet that controls how much and what kind of cholesterol is generated by your body, and that's what may or may not be a problem.

As I understand it, it hasn't been terribly well demonstrated that simply lowering cholesterol, usually with drugs, actually reduces any risk either; this remains conjecture despite the amount of cholesterol-reducing drugs in use. The "bad" and "good" cholesterols we've heard about seem to be fairly firmly correlated with bad heart health, but causation has not yet been established, unless there's been some fresh research I haven't heard about, which is very possible.

I generally choose the fattiest cuts of beef and pork that I can find. My triglycerides have gone down and my HDL has gone up, as one would expect given the link between carbohydrate intake and serum cholesterol. I'm planning to get retested in January.

As for the link between dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol? Here's an ACN meta-study:

http://www.jacn.org/cgi/content/abstract/16/6/530

"The misperception that dietary cholesterol determines blood cholesterol is held by many consumers in spite of evidence to the contrary...10 clinical trials (1994 to 1996) of the effects of dietary cholesterol on blood lipids and lipoproteins indicate that addition of an egg or two a day to a low-fat diet has little if any effect on blood cholesterol levels."

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