Online: | |
Visits: | |
Stories: |
Story Views | |
Now: | |
Last Hour: | |
Last 24 Hours: | |
Total: |
Follow TIS on Twitter: @Truth_is_Scary & Like TIS of Facebook- facebook.com/TruthisScary
Up until recently US government policy for the past 40 years has maintained that dietary cholesterol may cause heart disease.
This has now been reversed with the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee deciding to ditch their warning that claimed there was a link.
Naturalnews.com reports:
Even five years ago, the committee was still promoting the warning first popularized by tthe American Heart Association in 1961. But the new position has been a long time coming.
“There’s been a shift of thinking,” said Walter Willett, chair of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health. He called the committee’s decision to drop the cholesterol warning a “reasonable move.”
New scientific consensus
The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee provides science-based recommendations to the federal government, in the form of a publication called “Dietary Guidelines.” The government uses that publication to make decisions about everything including dietary advice (such as the food pyramid), school lunch content and food labeling policy.
In its new recommendations, the committee has embraced the emerging scientific consensus that consuming cholesterol in foods such as eggs, shrimp or lobster does not significantly increase blood levels of cholesterol in healthy adults, and does not increase the risk of heart disease. That’s because the body actually produces its own cholesterol, in levels much higher than those that can realistically come from food.
The new consensus warns instead against a diet too high in saturated fat, the nutrient the body uses to make cholesterol. High levels of LDL (“bad”) cholesterol in the blood are still considered a risk factor for heart disease.
The change in policy is a classic example of the way that nutrition guidelines continue to change as scientific understanding evolves — often greatly confusing consumers along the way. Although the cholesterol debate may soon be settled, nutrition researchers continue to debate the relative merits and risks of other foods and nutrients such as saturated fat, salt, red meat, sugar and omega-3s.