A new study reveals that eating high cholesterol foods, such as eggs, does not increase the risk of heart disease, Science World Report reports.
The Finnish study was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
The study's author, Dr. Jyrki Virtanen of the University of Eastern Finland, said his study is the latest to show that focusing on one aspect of a food, like the cholesterol in eggs, is not a reliable way to estimate the health impact of that food, according to Time.
Previous research studies have linked eating high-cholesterol foods with the risk of heart disease.
"Dietary cholesterol does not translate into high levels of blood cholesterol," said Dr. Luc Djoussé, an associate professor and heart disease researcher at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital, via TIME.
For the study, the researchers studied over 1,000 healthy men between the ages of 42 and 60. About a third of the participants were carriers of of ApoE4-a gene variant that may increase the risk of both Alzheimer's disease (AD) and heart disease.
The men in the current study consumed about 2,800 milligrams of cholesterol every week, on average. A quarter of the cholesterol that the participants consumed came from eating an average of four eggs weekly, according to The New York Times.
"Moderate intake of cholesterol doesn't seem to increase the risk of heart disease, even among those people at higher risk," Jyrki Viranen, an adjunct professor of epidemiology at the University of Eastern Finland, said, according to The New York Times.
The findings of the study suggested that there was no link between cardiovascular disease and total cholesterol or egg consumption in carriers of ApoE4 or non-carriers.
The researchers took into consideration factors including age, education, body-mass index (BMI), diabetes, hypertension and other characteristics.
