Top Chef: Low Cholesterol Makes Me Angry

So I have recently become addicted to Top Chef. So much so that I acquired the entire season 3 on Friday and proceeded to watch the entire thing in a disgusting fit of TV gorging all weekend long. I am vile. (Season 4 is playing right now...it’s not too late to get hooked. Go...go now).

It’s kind of like Project Runway for chefs - each episode they have to do two very difficult cooking challenges - limited time, budget, weird ingredients etc - and have them judged by some of the best chefs in the world. One of the challenges in Season 3 was to take classic American food, including as meatloaf, chicken a la king, cabbage rolls, lasagna, mac and cheese, tuna casserole, frank and beans, and make them LOWER CHOLESTEROL. Not lower fat or saturated fat or calories, but lower CHOLESTEROL.

This irketh me. Mostly because it’s wrongity wrong wrong. Let me explain.

For years and years doctors had noted that people with high total cholesterol had more heart attacks. This lead to the logical conclusion that by EATING less DIETARY cholesterol one could drop your BLOOD cholesterol. Remember when everything said “cholesterol free” and our dads were told to stay WELL clear of high cholesterol foods such as eggs?

Well it turns out that was all kind of wrong. Because EATING cholesterol seems to have little impact on the ratio of good:bad cholesterol (high density lipoprotein: low density lipoprotein), which is actually a much stronger indicator of heart disease risk than total cholesterol. Indeed, many nutrition scientists argue that it is eating the trans and saturated fats (not cholesterol) that bumps up blood cholesterol and skews the ratio to the bad. Check out the summary of the situation at this 2000 paper published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition.

Did I mention that was a 2000 paper...eight years ago? This is not new science and frankly I was kind of appalled that the Top Chef dudes haven’t figured that out. I realize their job is NOT to make healthy food, but fuck-off tasty food, but come on. The balance of evidence today is pointing to the fact that a diet high in artificial fats, saturated fats and traditional vegetable oils (canola and corn) and low in olive oil, fish (the omega-3 etc) is really driving heart disease risk. And SOMEBODY on the production team should have figured this out.

I probably wouldn’t have been so cheesed had not the judges singled out one dude for using lobster in his dish. Per 100 gram serving, lobster has 90 calories and 0.9 grams of total fat total...but it has 95 mg of cholesterol (about half an egg’s worth). For comparison, 100 grams of skinless, boneless chicken breast has 110 calories and 1.24 grams of fat....but just 58 mg of cholesterol. We’re theoretically supposed to limit consumption to 300 mg per day.

So by the CHOLESTEROL method, lobster is a sin indeed. But if - as science can now tell us - that EATING cholesterol in food, doesn’t functionally RAISE cholesterol in the blood, then I say the lobster is actually the healthier food. Fewer calories, saturated fat and more uber-health omega-3s (yes, yes there is the PRICE problem, but that’s another blog post, isn’t it?)

The public has surely been jerked around by the evolving science of dietary fats: what’s good, what’s bad and how much should we eat of ‘em. Helping people to understand these changes is IMPERATIVE. A show like Top Chef - with it’s superstars (Oh Padma the beautiful) and high entertainment value - is a prime opportunity to teach these very facts. I am INCREDIBLY disappointed that they just added to the confusion.

But I still love the show. That Padma, I tell you.