The Study
Associations of Changes in Blood Lipid Concentrations with Changes in Dietary Cholesterol Intake in the Context of a Healthy Low-Carbohydrate Weight Loss Diet: A Secondary Analysis of the DIETFITS Trial
This study looked at whether eating more eggs and cholesterol made people's bad cholesterol go up, but only in people who were already on a low-carb diet trying to lose weight. It didn't make people eat more cholesterol — it just watched what happened naturally. So we can't say eating more cholesterol causes changes — we can only say that in this group, it didn't seem to make a big difference.
Analysis score
Maximum 90 for a randomized controlled trial.
Where the score came from
People who ate more eggs and cut out sugary snacks and white bread didn't see their bad cholesterol go up—even when they ate way more cholesterol than doctors used to recommend.
Where does this study sit?
Reviews of RCTs (Meta-analyses)
Max 100Randomized Trials
Max 90Reviews of Cohort Studies
Max 85Cohort Studies
Max 72Reviews of Case-Control Studies
Max 63Case-Control Studies
Max 58Cross-Sectional & Case Series
Max 50Expert Opinion
Max 563 / 100
Quality score
Participants are randomly assigned to treatment or control groups, minimizing bias. The gold standard for testing whether an intervention causes an effect.
Key takeaways
Summary
Based on the study abstract and findings.
- 1Yes—this suggests that for people eating a low-carb, whole-food diet, eating up to two eggs a day doesn't harm blood cholesterol levels.
- 2People ate 322 mg of cholesterol per day at start, jumped to 460 mg/day after 12 months (mostly from eggs), and their LDL, HDL, and triglycerides didn't change.
Score breakdown, methodology, conflicts of interest, evidence analysis & raw study data
Publication
Journal
Nutrients
Year
2021
Authors
M. Vergara, Michelle E. Hauser, L. Aronica, J. Rigdon, Priya Fielding‐Singh, Cynthia W. Shih, C. Gardner
Related Content
Claims (6)
If you're overweight and eating a low-carb diet, swapping out bread and sugar for eggs will bump up your cholesterol intake from food—but your blood fats won't get worse after a year.
People who are overweight and eat a low-carb diet end up eating more cholesterol over time—way more than the old health guidelines recommended—but their bad and good cholesterol levels, and triglycerides, didn’t get worse. This suggests that eating more cholesterol might not hurt your heart like we used to think.
Even if you eat more eggs or other cholesterol-rich foods while on a low-carb diet, your triglyceride levels don’t seem to go up — probably because cutting out sugary and starchy foods balances things out.
If you're overweight and eating a low-carb diet to lose weight, eating more cholesterol-rich foods like eggs or shrimp won't noticeably raise your bad cholesterol or lower your good cholesterol — at least not over a year.
Eating foods that contain cholesterol—like eggs or shrimp—won't make a healthy person more likely to get heart disease.
If you're overweight and eating a low-carb diet, having up to two eggs a day for a year probably won't raise your 'bad' cholesterol — so eggs might be okay in this kind of diet.
Not medical advice. For informational purposes only. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making health decisions.