The dietary guidelines cite the National Academies in recommending that dietary

cholesterol consumption be as low as possible.

While eggs are the most concentrated source of cholesterol gram for gram, the greatest

contribution in the

American diet is meat, including poultry and fish.

But even if our cholesterol intake is zero, if you remember from my earlier video, our

liver dumps excess cholesterol into our digestive tract through the bile, expecting there

to be about 100 grams of fiber in there every day to trap it and flush it out of the bile, expecting there to be about 100 grams of fiber in there every day

to trap it and flush it out of the body.

But when people are getting 5 to 10 times less fiber than nature intended,

much of that cholesterol gets reabsorbed and can circulate back through our system.

That's why one of the components of the cholesterol-lowering portfolio diet are foods like

oatmeal that are high in sticky fiber that traps cholesterol, but the diet also includes

phytosterols, plant sterols.

This is what cholesterol looks like. This is what one of the phytosterols looks like.

It's almost identical. And the receptor here in the lining of our intestines can't tell the

difference. So the phytosterols compete with cholesterol to squeeze in through this receptor.

So if there's lots of phytosterols in the gut,

some of the cholesterol can't get in or back in and ends up in the toilet instead of our bloodstream.

Here's fecal cholesterol excretion in people eating different amounts of phytosterols.

The black is the amount of dietary cholesterol that's

being pooped out, and the white is the amount of cholesterol that our liver dumps into our

...