Risky, but easier than using your hand.

True, but our overall guidelines should not cater to exceptions and apply those specific needs to humanity as a whole.

Cholesterol is a broad term and doesn’t address the specifics necessary to addr iness overall average health for an individual. We do love our neat boxes to put things in.

Then there is the whole “sugar” issue. There are dozens of sugars and we only associate the term with fructose or sucrose. We can technically name all sorts of things as sugars, but if it doesn’t include sucrose and fructose explicitly, then it “isn’t” sugar on the label.

The Cholesterol thing is mostly true though.

Saturated fats aren’t a problem for most people, trans fats are a problem. Saturated fats are what you get with things like meat, trans fats are what you get with processed foods and vegetable oils.

In the early 1900s a Dr. Stefansson MD lived with the Inuit for 6 months. He was used to the diet meta of the times which dictated a vegetable heavy diet was necessary for health, the Inuit don’t have vegetables, they eat fish and fatty meat exclusively. He saw the Inuit as a healthy people and his own health improved during his time with them. He returned to the US and tried to spread his experience, he was dismissed because of racism towards the Inuit. They said that the diet and health of the Inuit has no relevance to the white man because the Inuit are primatives that have no culture or civilization.

He later did a study on himself and another man where they ate nothing but meat and had regular tests done. They were in perfect health, except when they ate too much lean meat and going back to fatty meats corrected the issue. Doctors, unwilling to find out what they knew was wrong, disregarded the study.

In the 50s, as a result of Eisenhower’s heart attack, a study was done of diets in 22 countries and their rates of heart disease. Of those 22 countries, 6 of them were chosen to be the basis of the argument that saturated fats are bad because they showed a direct link between a diet higher in saturated fats and a higher rate of heart disease. When you look at all 22 countries, no such correlation can be drawn. That study was reported on heavily and saturated fats were now the cause of heart attacks.

Later on in the 70s the government got involved with nutrition and diet, in order to address the growing heart disease, and did what government does best and they fucked it up with a commission that was made up of politicians. They spent 10 years wanting to say that fats were bad because there was fatty deposits in patients with heart disease, so fat must be the problem. Their entire argument was that the cholesterol observed in hearts and arteries was a result of eating fatty foods. There was no evidence, only an unsupported hypothesis based on logic about as bulletproof as saying that meat makes maggots because you find maggots on meat. They pointed to the 1950s study as supporting evidence, they remember when it broke as news and held onto it religiously. Doctors at the time disagreed and wanted more studies done before saying that fatty foods were the problem. No evidence from those studies supported removing meat, nuts, cheese, and other fatty foods from your diet improved one’s health. At the end of it, the commission declared that some fatty foods is ok but grains, fruits, and vegetables should be most of your diet.

The whole fat is bad argument comes from that dietary and nutrition commission. It was also the basis for the food pyramid, which has no foundation in nutritional science.

Epidemiological studies are an inflammatory aspect of the cholesterol issue. They are poorly conducted studies that show vague associations and then the media pulls small associations from and blow it up to say things like egg yolks cause a greater risk of hearth attack when the data they got didn’t say that.

Tl;Dr: Eating lots of meat isn’t a problem for cholesterol, you only think that because of decades of bad science.

So your friend isn’t a conspiracy theorist, they just couldn’t or wouldn’t tell you all of that and what I wrote is like 10% of the whole story.