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High cholesterol is a major risk factor for your health, especially as you get older.
It’s a fatty substance common to high-fat meats like beef, lamb and pork, processed meat products like bacon and sausages, full-fat dairy products, tropical oils like palm oil and coconut oil, baked treats, and fried foods.
Having high cholesterol isn’t a problem until it suddenly is, with no symptoms preceding any health issues it might cause. It can trigger heart disease and strokes as it starts to block arteries, and so it’s important to be screened for high cholesterol as you get older.
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It’s made worse by a low activity, unhealthy diet, and smoking, as well as age, genetics and gender – men and menopausal women are more susceptible to high cholesterol – and it can be tackled with lifestyle changes.
Getting regular exercise, improving your diet, limiting high-cholesterol food intake, quitting smoking and potentially taking particular prescribed medications can all help.
When it comes to high cholesterol foods, it seems that one famous one has been falsely accused.
It’s widely believed that eggs are high in cholesterol, but new research has found they actually help to manage your bodily cholesterol levels.
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The British Heart Foundation noted that high cholesterol sufferers have previously been instructed to eat fewer than three or four eggs each week as the yolks contain cholesterol.
However, per the BHF’s senior dietician, Victoria Taylor, this advice is rooted in a misunderstanding around egg cholesterol, and indeed dietary cholesterol more generally.
“Now current research shows that for most healthy people, cholesterol in food, such as eggs, has a much smaller effect on blood levels of total cholesterol and harmful LDL cholesterol, especially when compared with the much greater and more harmful effects of saturated fatty acids found in foods such as butter and fatty meat,” said the BHF.
As eggs are actually low in saturated fat, more recent research indicates that an egg a day does not contribute to increased heart disease risk in healthy people following a healthy diet.
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That said, the BHF noted that ‘people with familial hypercholesterolaemia (1 in 500 in the UK) would still be advised to restrict dietary cholesterol intake - no more than three or four eggs a week’.
However, new research indicates that eggs, and other low-LDL foods, may help to lower your bodily cholesterol.
Published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, a study from the University of South Australia found that eating two eggs per day reduced participants’ LDL cholesterol. It suggests that a diet featuring high cholesterol and low saturated fats may be more effective at lowering cholesterol than abstaining from high-cholesterol foods.
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More research is required to draw any definitive conclusions, but it seems like good news for egg fans and low-cholesterol aspirants alike.
Rachael Davis