[Cosimo]

Warning: long.

Summary: if you think saturated fats and cholesterol are bad because Dan Rather said so, then maybe you should check your sources. Reference to scientific literature carries greater weight with me than the "common sense" of daytime talk shows, newsrags, and the evening news.

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I'm not advocating bacon and eggs because soy is bad; I'm advocating staying away from soy because soy is bad.

So, (1) soy is bad. As for bacon and eggs, (2) there ain't nothing necessarily wrong with saturated fat, and often there's a lot of good there, and (3) there ain't nothing wrong with dietary cholesterol.

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Uhh...right.

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The issue at hand is what's called the Lipid Hypothesis -- the theory that the cholesterol in fatty foods builds up in your arteries and causes heart disease. This is true only in a very twisted way: artheriosclerotic plaques are indeed constructed of cholesterol, but they don't build up just because you eat cholesterol. It's the body's way of repairing arterial damage, caused by toxic chemicals, lack of essential vitamins (esp C, which is a building block of cell walls), and/or pathogenic microbes. The causes of arterial damage is a current, active area of research, so there's not a lot of answers for what causes that damage. But the remaining evidence is clear: plaques form as a result of that damage, not as a result of eating bacon and eggs.

The average adult liver produces 2000mg of cholesterol a day. That's the equivalent of 20 eggs. There's a huge amount of cholesterol in the brain, and pregnant women not getting enough cholesterol risk bearing children with neural defects. Cholesterol is used in the body's native production of Vitamin D and dozens of hormones, from testosterone to adrenalin.

Saturated fats are excellent sources of the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, and K, anti-microbial and anti-fungal; some are essential (ie must be present in the diet for normal metabolic function); and short-chain saturated fats are premium sources for energy. Many older research papers confused natural saturated fats (cis) with hydrogenated fats (trans-fats), usually by using hydrogenated plant oils; much of the 'evil' attributed to saturated fats comes from just a couple of these studies.