Dr. Danielle Belardo

But when you look at the cohort data over time, we know that people who eat more red meat and don't eat enough dietary fiber from plants

Plant foods have a higher risk of colorectal cancer, other certain kinds of cancers.

And so one of the things that I think is great is that when you look at the nutrition recommendations from all the major medical organizations, so whether it's the cardiology organizations, endocrine organizations, or the cancer organizations,

There's actually synergy across all of the recommendations because the same sort of dietary pattern, plants predominant, Mediterranean diet does not need to be exclusively plant-based, shows a benefit for a multitude of disease prevention.

Wow.

Absolutely.

So great question.

So the reason why we kind of don't focus on eggs too much is because it's the totality of the dietary pattern that matters.

So one of the reasons why even in our clinical practice statement that we included, we recommend limiting saturated fat to about less than 7% of calories, ideally.

And the reason why we don't talk about dietary cholesterol as much is because it tracks with the saturated fat.

If the only saturated fat someone's eating is egg yolks, but the rest of their dietary pattern is low in saturated fats, high in fiber, high in poly and monounsaturated fat, then that may fit into their dietary budget.

Depending on, I don't know how many egg yolks that would include, but if they tracked it, it may still fit into their dietary budget for what is the best lipid ratio with regards to fatty acids they're eating.

Got it.

But because you're not going to, foods that are high in cholesterol are also high in saturated fat.

So that's why we tell people, it's not that dietary cholesterol doesn't matter.

It's just that if you just focus on lowering saturated fat first, you can kind of get there.

That kind of goes into the myth that we need cholesterol.

So I'm not sure if any of your biohacker guests have mentioned that people may say that, well, you need cholesterol.

You have to eat cholesterol or you can't lower your cholesterol too much.

And in cardiology,