Effect of Dietary Cholesterol upon Serum Lipids in Rural Guatemalan Indian Children

LTHOUGII the cholesterol content of the diet has been considered to have a rela-tively unimportant influence on cholesterol-emia in man, recent evidence suggests that it is a significant hypercholesterolemic factor. Several efforts to prove this effect, in which crystalline cholesterol was used, have been es ’ ‘ But it appears that cho-lesterol in diets containing a good amount of certain fats46 or of lipoprotein complexes7 is well absorbed by man and produces hyper-cholesterolemia. In previous field it was shown that a dietary supplement containing 600 mg. of crystalline cholesterol and 1 5 ml. of cotton-seed oil given to rural Guatemalan Indian school children in one glass of Incaparina8 daily for four weeks and then increased to 1,200 mg. for another four weeks did not pro-duce significant changes in serum lipid levels, including serum cholesterol. It was shown also,9 in the same population, that the daily ingestion of 60 gm. of skim milk or 30 gm. of different fats over long periods of time failed to produce changes in serum cholesterol con-centration. On the other hand, when the diet commonly consumed by families from the upper socioeconomic groups was given t