Eggs, heart healthy superfood or a cholesterol bomb? Today, we're cracking open one of the biggest myths in nutrition, and the answers might surprise you. A single egg has about 2 and a half times the cholesterol content of a Big Mac. Yes. A Big Mac. Yeah. For some people, eating eggs barely affects their blood cholesterol. While for others, perhaps you, eggs significantly raises cholesterol levels. The difference, primarily your genes, your genetic makeup.

In the next 20 minutes, I'm going to unpack this by walking you through how we absorb and excrete cholesterol in our diet from the foods that we eat. And I'll share with you 2 simple, but oddly not very commonly spoken about, blood tests that you can use to determine if eggs are problematic for your heart health based on your genes. Are you a cholesterol hyper absorber or not? Personalized nutrition. Exactly. Now, let me just say upfront here, I get it. Cholesterol talk can sound like a snooze fest. But trust me, understanding this could be a game changer for your health. When you understand this information, it makes it much easier to know if you should eat eggs or perhaps avoid them altogether.

Plus, who doesn't want to know if they're genetically blessed? Let's be honest. 1st, let's start with the difference between dietary cholesterol and cholesterol in our blood. After all, they are not the same thing. And so often, I see people conflating the 2. Cholesterol in our blood, just like fats or triglycerides, is shuttled through our blood bound to proteins. Together, cholesterol, fats, and these proteins are called lipoproteins. The cholesterol within these lipoproteins comes from 2 main sources, our liver and all peripheral cells, which accounts for about 75 to 80% of cholesterol in circulation, with the rest primarily from our gut, a mix of cholesterol from the food we eat and cholesterol in bile, which is sent to the gut from the liver to help with the digestion of fats. In a typical person's diet, about 20% of the cholesterol absorbed in their gut is from the foods they've eaten, also known as ingested cholesterol.

And the other 80% is from bile, also known as hepatobiliary delivered cholesterol. A quick little side note and myth buster for the geeks out there like me, When I say peripheral cells, I'm referring to all cells in the body that have the capacity to produce cholesterol outside of the liver and the brain. Excess cholesterol produced by these cells ends up in circulation and is taken back to the liver. This is a huge point of confusion online. Lipoproteins like LDL or low density lipoprotein are not, except in very rare circumstances, taking cholesterol out to cells. All cells produce their own cholesterol and usually produce excess cholesterol that then needs to be carried back to the liver by low density lipoproteins. Thus, the primary role of these lipoproteins is 1st and foremost to carry triglycerides or fats to cells for energy production and to carry cholesterol back from cells to the liver. Already, I hope you can appreciate that cholesterol in circulation is not simply the cholesterol we eat.

The majority of the cholesterol in circulation or in our blood is produced by the liver and our peripheral cells that produce cholesterol. Then of the cholesterol absorbed into circulation from our gut, only 1 5th of this is actually from our diet. The rest is from bile. So when I say dietary cholesterol, I mean the cholesterol that is in our food. Whereas when I say cholesterol in the blood or cholesterol in circulation, two ways of essentially saying the same thing, I'm referring to the total pool of cholesterol in our blood, which is a mix of cholesterol produced by the liver, peripheral cells, and cholesterol absorbed in our gut from the food we eat and the bile that's reabsorbed. For this reason, you can't simply measure blood cholesterol and attribute that to dietary cholesterol, Which means if you eat a lot of eggs, and therefore a lot of dietary cholesterol, and have high cholesterol, it may not be the eggs that are to blame. Now let's dive into how cholesterol is absorbed. It's crucial to understand this process to see how foods like eggs can affect our blood cholesterol levels.