Too much cholesterol?

Question
I'm a seventeen year old male athlete.  I weigh 160lbs and take in over 200g of protein a day.  As 60g of that is from 2 cans of tuna and 20g is from 3 eggs, my question is this too much cholesterol daily?  The nutrition information says 1 egg contains about 71% of the daily value and 1 can of tuna contains about 10% of cholesterol.  Am I making a mistake by choosing these sources of protein?  

Answer
Jonathan,

The recommended amount of dietary cholesterol is less than 300 mg a day.  It looks like you would be getting too much cholesterol in your diet.

However, you are probably at a greater health risk from the very high amount of protein you are eating.  The recommended amount of daily protein for a weight lifter is .54-.9 grams per pound of body weight (.54 g/lb to maintain muscle mass, .68 g/lb. to increase muscle mass and .9 g/lb to lose weight while increasing muscle mass).  Here is the math:
160 x .54 = 86.4 grams to maintain muscle
160 x .68 = 108.8 grams to increase muscle
160 x .9 = 144 grams to increase muscle while losing weight (total daily calories must be decreased to lose weight)

Your daily protein range is 86.4 - 144 grams per day.  All that extra protein is not doing you any good and is being stored as fat if you do not burn it up on a daily basis.  There is no research that shows extra large amounts of protein will increase muscle mass or strength.  Too much protein in your diet can cause dehydration and puts extra stress on you kidneys and, as I just said, is a waste of time.  Here are links to the articles I used as references:
http://www.acsm.org/pdf/fitsc302.pdf
http://www.acsm-msse.org/pt/pt-core/template-journal/msse/media/1200.pdf

Guess what?  When you cut back on all that extra protein, you will also be cutting back on the extra cholesterol.  I can feel your health getting better already.


Best wishes.

Todd
ACSM Registered Clinical Exercise Physiologist

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