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SeaUrchinHorizon@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

False. Here’s a short 4 minute video with several referenced studies by a renowned lifestyle medicine doctor debunking this myth: Does Dietary Cholesterol (Eggs) Raise Blood Cholesterol?. TL;DR: Even 90% of egg industry funded studies show eggs raise cholesterol.

I also wrote the below, on how bad studies funded by industry interests can be cherrypicked by journalists who want to conclude “<unhealthy food> is healthy, actually” such that these myths arise in the first place. I explored this particular example of “dietary cholesterol is good” by scrutinizing the first PubMed study I found on the subject, as an example of what to look for in good study design.


Saying that dietary cholesterol is good is factually insane, eating dietary cholesterol absolutely raises your cholesterol. However, it’s common to hold these false narratives about nutrition. The issue is that it’s incredibly easy to create a faulty study design if you go in trying to prove “eggs are healthy,” for instance. Take, for example, the egg industry, which has something to gain by convincing people that the massively high cholesterol in eggs isn’t bad for you, and oftentimes funds these biased study designs.

What does a biased study look like?

What does an unbiased study look like? The best study design, imo, is a meta-analysis of several randomized double-blind placebo-controlled intervention studies.

In this case, I’m assuming you’re getting this false information from studies like this Dietary Cholesterol and the Lack of Evidence in Cardiovascular Disease which right off the bat raises red flags due to being written by a single author, saying ‘eggz are helthy,’ the funding section only being funded by some unnamed “institutional startup,” and finally only being a literature review (very easy to cherry pick bad data), not an intervention study of it’s own

One of the studies linked in that study, Egg consumption and heart health: A review (yet another literature review with no actual study) is mostly just saying 1) “cholesterol is often high in foods also high in saturated fats,” 2) “saturated fat is unhealthy,” 3) “ergo we can’t just conclude because something has cholesterol in it it’s unhealthy,” 4) “eggs are high in cholesterol but low in saturated fats,” 5) “eggs have all these nutrients that are useful,” 6) “therefore, eggs are healthy.”

The error in this logic is between 5 & 6. We’re starting with the (false) assumption that cholesterol isn’t necessarily unhealthy, but you can’t go from Maybe Not Unhealthy + Cherrypicked Good Components = Healthy, you have to actually test the food.

However, because everyone wants to convince themselves eating unhealthy food is healthy, faulty studies like this get reported in “health” magazines until when your doctor says “eating eggs is bad for you” you think “but I saw that study one time that says it wasn’t, maybe science just doesn’t know” (it does) and the egg industry is laughing all the way to the bank for successfully convincing you that the whole thing is too complicated for you to know or care.

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