On Food and Cooking

embryo must construct many millions before
it hatches. There is some variability in the
cholesterol contents of different breeds, and
the hen’s diet has some effect — a feed high
in sitosterol, a vegetable relative of
cholesterol, brings egg cholesterol down by a
third. But these reductions still leave egg yolk
way ahead of most other foods.
Since high blood cholesterol does increase
the risk of heart disease, many medical
associations have long recommended limiting
our yolk consumption to two or three per
week. However, recent studies of moderate
eaters have shown that egg consumption has
little influence on blood cholesterol. This is
partly because blood cholesterol is raised far
more powerfully by saturated fats in the diet
than by cholesterol itself, and most of the fat
in egg yolk is unsaturated. It also appears that
other fatty substances in the yolk, the
phospholipids, interfere with our absorption
of yolk cholesterol. So there no longer seems