All high cholesterol foods are animal meats or animal products. You cannot get additional cholesterol from plants, fruits, or vegetables. Having said that, let me assure you that this article is not about getting you to become a vegetarian. I do hope to show you why limiting (not eliminating) your consumption of foods high in cholesterol, especially the worst ones, can help prevent a number of serious, sometimes fatal, conditions.
First, however, I feel that it is important for you to understand just exactly why eating a lot of high cholesterol foods is so detrimental to your health.
Every cell in your body, from skin to bones, uses cholesterol much as a bricklayer uses mortar. It binds your cells together to make tissue. It’s also turned into a bile acid and dumped into your intestines to aid food digestion and used for other things, but, for this discussion, those are the two important uses. Without it, well…
Mother Nature designed you so that all of the cholesterol you need is made in your liver. Additional cholesterol that you may get from eating high cholesterol foods is also deposited there. From your liver, it gets transported to every cell in your body by an enzyme called low density lipoproteins (aka: LDL), using your bloodstream as a “highway”. The LDL goes from cell to cell, depositing any cholesterol that the cells need. Any cell that has enough when the LDL shows up sends a “No,Thanks!” signal, and the LDL moves along without unloading any of it’s cargo.
Now, here’s the bad part. When the LDL reaches the end of it’s trip, it deposits any left-over cholesterol on the walls of your arteries before returning to your liver to load up again. Over time, these deposits can build up and choke off blood flow through the artery, starving any organs that are “down stream”. This is most apparent, and most publicized, in the arteries of your heart because of the large number of heart attacks that it causes each year.
I see no reason to delve into high density lipoproteins (aka: HDL, or good cholesterol), since food has no bearing on it’s level in your body. If you’d like a better understanding of the importance of your LDL to HDL ratio, read this article.
Medical professionals recommend that you consume no more than 300 milligrams (mg) of cholesterol each day. Some high cholesterol foods will contain more than that in one serving! To give you an idea of how easy it actually is to consume way too much cholesterol, check out the chart below. This chart is not all inclusive, by any means, but a simple Google search will find you cholesterol content of just about any food.
Keep in mind that this chart assumes a 100 gram serving, which is about 3½ ounces (not very much!)
As you can see from the chart, some high cholesterol foods are just unhealthy, while others can be real killers. Use this information as you will. We’ve all got to go some day, but, why rush it?
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