Insulin resistance, dietary cholesterol, and cholesterol concentration in postmenopausal women

Questions remain concerning the effect of variations in cholesterol intake on plasma cholesterol concentration, as well as on the role of factors modulating the metabolic impact of this dietary intervention. To define the impact of wide variations in dietary cholesterol intake on plasma total and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol concentrations, as well as testing the hypothesis that resistance to insulin-mediated glucose disposal would accentuate the increase in plasma total and LDL cholesterol concentrations in response to a given increment in dietary cholesterol intake, we performed a prospective, randomized study comparing diets varying in cholesterol content in 65 healthy, postmenopausal women, 31 defined as insulin-resistant and 34 as insulin-sensitive. The changes in total and LDL cholesterol in response to increments in dietary cholesterol of up to approximately 800 mg/day were modest in magnitude, without evidence of a statistically significant diet-induced increase in cholesterol concentration, or of any difference in the responses of insulin-resistant as compared with insulin-sensitive women. These results indicate that relatively large increments in dietary cholesterol intake had little effect on total or LDL cholesterol concentrations in healthy, postmenopausal women, irrespective of whether they were insulin-resistant or insulin-sensitive.