High cholesterol and coronary heart disease

Part 4: Dietary cholesterol doesn't affect blood cholesterol

Dietary cholesterol was also was ruled out as a cause of raised blood cholesterol and heart disease.

The longest running and most respected is the Framingham Heart Study. This study was set up in the town of Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1948 and is still going on today. It was this study that gave rise to other 'risk factors' with which we all are so familiar today: lack of exercise, smoking, and so on.

The Framingham researchers thought that they knew exactly why some people had more cholesterol in their blood than others — they ate more in their diet. To prove the link, they measured cholesterol intake and compared it with blood cholesterol. As the Table shows, although subjects consumed cholesterol over a wide range, there was little or no difference in the levels of cholesterol in their blood and, thus, no relationship between the amount of cholesterol eaten and levels of blood cholesterol was found.

There is, in short, no suggestion of any relation between diet and the subsequent development of CHD in the study group.’[1]