[Silock]

Originally Posted by DaKCMan AP

Explain people who live in other countries, eat more of a plant-based whole foods diet and have much better cholesterol scores than Americans. Then explain how those same people who then move to the US, adopt an American diet and have their cholesterol levels rise to US numbers.

Originally Posted by Metrolike

Explain people improving cholesterol levels by eating more fiber rich foods and less cholesterol rich foods respectively? I'm pretty sure both (genes and diet) play a large role.

The problem is that cholesterol scores do not differentiate between the cholesterol produced by the body and cholesterol from food. So, eating food with less cholesterol may improve scores. It also may not. People that eat low cholesterol food may have good scores. They may have bad scores. People with bad diets may have bad scores and may also have good scores. The thing is that the score itself is simply a total of the HDL (good), LDL (bad) and triglycerides.

So, while one might have a good "score," they still might have low levels of HDL. That's not very good. Conversely, one might have a bad score because they have a lot of HDL in their system. The total score itself isn't very useful.

Again, I'm not saying that diet has no effect. It absolutely does. The foods you eat can have very long-term post-prandial effects, which can negatively influence scores by creating artificially high triglyceride count that may not be present all the time. You can also use your diet to get more beneficial levels of HDL.

I'm simply saying that eating cholesterol isn't going to cause your body to start magically producing all bad cholesterol with none of the good. That's genetics. Sometimes, a person can do all the dietary things possible to get a good "score" and still have too much LDL and/or triglycerides.