The relationship between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol are not clear.
The old guideline was 300 mg per day, but now they just say as little as possible, which is lame and useless. Another guideline is a 200 mg limit for people with known heart disease issues.
In general, dietary cholesterol is closely associated with saturated fat intake, so if you keep close watch on the latter, you should be ok with cholesterol. This is all about meat and dairy consumption. So, keep your eyes on saturated fat and cholesterol will go along for the ride.
Consider this statement, which puts a different spin on things:
“Saturated fat increases blood cholesterol and heart disease risk much more than dietary cholesterol.”
The wild card are eggs, One egg has 150 to 200 mg of cholesterol! If you are going to eat eggs, just don't eat them with bacon and sausage! You could (in theory) eat an egg a day and stay under the 300 mg limit, but I don't think that would be a good idea. I am thinking of limiting myself to one egg per week. Most of that cholesterol is in the yolk.
And here is another spin on eggs. Although they are high in cholesterol, they are low in saturated fat (one egg has only 8 percent of your daily saturated fat quota). So if your blood cholesterol levels are OK, feel free to eat up to one egg per day!
As much as I would like a hard number or definite guidelines (and I am going to work up my own regardless of the double-talk from the experts), we are faced with another issue. The body generates cholesterol (in the liver we presume) and needs a certain amount of it to build cells and such. As people age, they tend to have higher blood cholesterol levels (presumably with the same diet). Cholesterol levels also may be affected by what good things we eat, maybe as much as what bad things we don't.Tom's home page / tom@mmto.org