Egg Yolks? Cholesterol?

We get so many email questions about egg yolks (“But my diet recipe just calls for two!” so I went downstairs, & Bob dictated this to me -- after first groaning, “What are egg yolks doing on a diet site!?” (The answer’s obvious: They want you to like them & buy what they’re selling & they don’t want their baked stuff to fall apart. Egg yolks and sugar are cooking/baking’s bad boy glue.)

So we talked about the spiking rates of heart disease, diabetes type 2 & pre-diabetes (2 out of 3 Americans, including young, pregnant women), and Bob said…:

“One egg yolk has 300 mg. of cholesterol. Now, a healthy, completely normal person with no risk factors (normal cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar, weight, & exercise routine) should have no more than that number, 300 mg. a day.

“If someone has even one of those risk factors, s/he should have no more than 200 mg. a day. The kicker is, even a small (4 oz) serving of beef, chicken, or fish has 70 mg. of cholesterol -- and then people eat more cholesterol from sources they’re not even aware of.” (Fish & cleaned-of-fat-&-skin chicken do have cholesterol. What they don’t have is saturated fat.)

Autopsy studies of Korean War casualties, for example, revealed that over three-quarters of apparently fit American soldiers, at an average age of 22 years, already had evidence of atherosclerosis*[37]. This alarming finding has been confirmed in numerous subsequent autopsy reports and more recently in studies using intra-vascular ultrasound. Tuzcu et al.*[38], examining coronary arteries of donor hearts in a transplantation programme, showed that atherosclerosis was present in almost one-fifth of teenagers and in 85% of those aged 50 years or older.

That *[37]…if you want to see the note’s source, scroll all the way to the end of the article (p. F23), & there it is, #37. A Landmark article in the JAMA.

That *[38] study was done in 1996! What would it be now, FIFTEEN years later!? A third of teenagers? Half?