@kincella - Yep! I am saying its wrong. Unfortunately it seems constant in the main stream, but if you look at the hard science, the whole diet-heart hypothesis has been proven incorrect many a time. (The original study which started it all was shown to use cherry picked data and the lipid hypothesis before that showing that cholesterol is inherently bad was done on rabbits... yes rabbits)
Cholesterol has been incorrectly demonized for no other reason but profit. It's much easier to pick something, claim it to be a problem, and then invent a mutli billion dollar industry in regards to eradicating it, rather than actually fix the underlying causes.
Not many people know this, but cholesterol is produced by the liver as well as other internal organs. That's right, that evil substance, is actually made by the human body. Why? because it is required for human life!
Not to get too sciency, but cholesterol comes in two forms, unesterified (or free) and esterified. The majority of what we eat is esterified which can not be absorbed! And guess what, the body has an incredible feedback mechanism, so if it finds too much in the system, it stops producing it! And vice versa.
When talking about good and bad 'cholesterol' people are actually talking about the carrier proteins (LDL and HDL) of the cholesterol, not the cholesterol itself.
If high cholesterol levels were the cause of heart disease then why do the French (with notoriously high levels of cholesterol, i believe highest in the world) have low incidences of heart disease. Or why on average men are 3x more likely to have heart disease than women, yet women on average have higher levels of heart disease.
Now why eat foods with high cholesterol in them like butter, fat meats etc? Well because these foods also contain a relatively new b-vitamin called choline. Choline is the ultimate brain vitamin. It is used in the synthesis of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine (amongst other things throughout the body). What food has some of the highest levels of choline?! Liver! Thats right, your mum was right all those years!
End of the day, choline is a very important molecule for the human body, it is incorrectly vilified.
Even recently a study showed that HIGHER cholesterol levels in women lead to LOWER death. ( http://www.drbriffa.com/2011/10/06/why-a-raised-cholesterol-level-may-be-a-cause-for-celebration/ )
Apologies for the long-winded-ness of this response, its a personal pet-peeve of mine.
