“If you have risk factors for heart disease, you should not consume more than 200 milligrams of cholesterol a day. If you do not have risk factors for heart disease, you should limit your cholesterol intake to no more than 300 milligrams a day.” - UCSF Health
But 100g of chicken liver has 563mg of cholesterol? How is this study any accurate?
They keep pushing those “upper limits” for dietary cholesterol at schools and etc. Its known that exogenous cholesterol has little to do with your circulating TC, HDL and LDL, we produce, excret and reabsorb large amounts of it on a daily basis.Amount and type of fat/fiber is what really matters on this subject.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000743
The current evidence regarding the link between dietary cholesterol and CVD is inconclusive. This doesn’t mean there is not a relationship (like some people here seem absolutely intent to claim) but that there are studies that conflict one another and the quality of many studies is poor.
My spidey sense on this one is that a relationship does exist but varies enormously on an individual basis based on biome function. Our gut does contain the right enzymes to hydrolyze cholesterol esters but the quantity will vary enormously person to person and there is already a known relationship between the biome and LDL https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8347163/. If this is the case it is not individually testable with current science so people would have no idea if they should avoid cholesterol or not.
Generally, but not universally, foods high in cholesterol are also high in saturated fat which does have a well demonstrated relationship with CVD. That is the part of the nutritional label you should care about (along with carb content, simple & refined carbs are also a CVD risk factor). The continued advice to avoid cholesterol is mostly because of this relationship, if you are reading the entire label you can probably ignore it.
With the exception of foie gras liver is an extremely nutritionally dense & heart healthy food.
It doesn’t look like it is from a study.
For most people dietary cholesterol has minimal impact on blood levels.
I’m not sure exactly what they mean by risk factors, but it might mean those where blood levels are strongly influenced by diet.
In respect to your question about chicken, it’s basically saying if you do have risk factors then you should avoid having chicken regularly.
From what I’ve seen dietary cholesterol doesn’t really raise your cvd risk but consuming too much saturated fat does by upregulating production of the bad cholesterol so your ratios start to get out of whack. With dietary cholesterol your body will actually down regulate production of cholesterol overall to compensate so dietary cholesterol isn’t really affecting you the same way as consuming too much saturated fat.
Usually, people don’t eat so much dietary cholesterol that it’s a huge factor in their blood lipids. But yea, there is a medication called ezetimibe that works by lowering intestinal absorption of bile/cholesterol, and it does work.