Does eating too much egg yolk really cause excess cholesterol? The answer is not what you think, so take a look!
Eggs, a cheap, delicious and nutritious food, are one of the most common ingredients on the table, but also the most controversial.
Among the rumors about eggs and health, the most widely circulated one is that many people are convinced that the egg yolk contains a lot of cholesterol. Eating egg yolk will cause excessive cholesterol intake and high blood lipids.
In fact, this statement cannot be completely said to be a rumor, because in the 1977 American Dietary Guidelines, it is clearly pointed out that adults should limit their cholesterol intake , preferably not more than 300mg per day, which is equivalent to the cholesterol of two eggs .
The reason for such a rumor is that in 1913, some scientists conducted experiments on rabbits and found that after eating a huge amount of cholesterol, the rabbits developed arteriosclerosis.
However, this experiment is, in essence, unstable. Because there is a gap between animals and humans, not to mention that rabbits themselves are herbivores and have no intake of cholesterol. Suddenly giving them a lot of cholesterol will naturally affect their health.
In 1999, a professor at Harvard University published a research paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The results showed that they investigated the relationship between diet and heart disease in 120,000 people, and found that eating eggs and heart disease actually did not Not associated .
A related paper was also published in the British Medical Journal in 2013, which looked at the diet of 3.08 million people and found no association between egg intake and atherosclerosis and heart disease.
The reason for this is because no matter what type of food you eat, it will be operated and absorbed through the digestive system, and only the substances that are useful to the body will be used to synthesize the nutrients needed by the human body.
In fact, the so-called high cholesterol mainly refers to the cholesterol that comes from the blood and is synthesized by itself. A healthy adult's daily body synthesis of cholesterol is about 1000-2000 mg . That is to say, even if you don't eat any food, the body will automatically synthesize cholesterol, and the second is to supplement cholesterol from food.
To give a very simple example, if an adult weighs 140 pounds, the cholesterol in the body is about 140g , and the daily update is about 1g , 4/5 of which are produced in the body, and only 1/5 is produced. is obtained from food. Moreover, the absorption rate of cholesterol is very limited, only about 30%.
The more the cholesterol content of food increases, the more its absorption rate will decrease. Moreover, the human body itself has the ability to regulate cholesterol. If you take in more, the body will produce less, and excess cholesterol will be excreted in the feces . In other words, a healthy adult , even eating 5 eggs a day, will not cause cholesterol to rise.
In addition, everyone should look at cholesterol itself rationally. It has an irreplaceable role in the human body. It can not only form bile acid, but also form the cell membrane (cholesterol is the basic component of the cell membrane, accounting for the lipid of the plasma membrane. 20% or more), can also play a role in the synthesis of hormones .
If the serum cholesterol level is low, it may lead to decreased immune function and decreased blood vessel strength.
Therefore, the claim that eating egg yolks can cause excessive cholesterol is essentially a rumor. However, this does not mean that everyone can eat eggs recklessly, because eggs are, after all, a highly nutritious food, and long-term consumption of large amounts may cause obesity. Therefore, science recommends that everyone eat 1-2 eggs a day for the best state.