Do you find this as interesting as I do?

Good Morning Guys, I know I am obsessed with pictures of soft boiled eggs lately! What's up with that? Anyways.

I love Svelte Gourmand. It's a beautiful blog about, yup you guessed it cooking gourmet health food that tastes like gourmet food. Also there's a lot of info on the health effects of food and yesterday Sara wrote about "Why we shouldn't stress about cholestrol in our food." Here's what she had to say:

"Yesterday I had eggs for breakfast, a shrimp and crab salad for lunch, and some cheddar cheese with dinner. And I didn’t think twice about the fact that these were all high-cholesterol foods. That’s because lately, I’ve been reading a lot of information about just how wrong we’ve been about what cholesterol is and what it does in our bodies.

Let’s start with cholesterol in food itself: For decades, we’ve been told that eating food high in cholesterol will increase our bodies’ own cholesterol. But especially in recent years, study after study’s shown that’s not the case. One Yale experiment by Dr. David Katz, for example, found that eating two eggs a day for six weeks had no harmful effect on healthy adults–even those who already had high cholesterol.

The same’s been shown with shellfish, and, as Camille’s previously posted, butter. A lot of experts say this is because the cholesterol we get from these sources is just different from what’s in our bodies. Katz has a different explanation.

He believes that since our early ancestors ate an incredibly cholesterol-rich diet (organ meats, shellfish, etc.) it makes sense that our bodies have evolved to handle the substance at high levels. What really does raise our cholesterol, he adds, is food that’s high in saturated or trans fats.

If you’re running with this idea, it leads to an interesting question: If we can effectively process all the cholesterol we eat–why do we sometimes seem to overproduce and not process the cholesterol we make in own bodies?

Yesterday, I read a Huffington Post article that really got to the meat of this. In it, columnist Joseph Mercola, MD, argues that high cholesterol doesn’t cause heart disease–it’s a byproduct of another problem: Inflammation. When our bodies get inflamed, cholesterol is released in huge amounts because one of its functions is–believe it or not–to repair cellular damage. According to Mercola, it’s the weakened artery walls that are the real concern. Reduce inflammation so you protect those walls, and you’ll control your cholesterol. How do you do that? By following, among other things, David Katz’s advice: Monitoring your saturated and trans fat intake. (There are also a whole lot more you can do, like cutting down on sugars, simple carbs, and processed foods.)

The inflammation argument makes a lot of sense to me; I especially like Katz’s point about how cholesterol’s been part of our diet throughout time. It stands to reason that we’d know how to process them a whole lot better than, say, a Twinkie or bag of Pringles."

This makes complete sense to me and is so interesting. I think another thing that can add to the inflammation is daily stress. I see this in my Dad's side of the family and am conscious of being effected as a result.So, keep my stress levels down, keep my trans fats and high frutouse syrup intake low and I will live a long healthy life......Right?

Love and Hugs