Title pretty much says it all. Is it likely that a single intake of high-cholesterol comestibles could peak my LDL?
It doesn’t work quite that way.
All the cholesterol in your bloodstream, the LDL, the HDL, VLDL, and various other subtypes, were all manufactured by your body, in your liver.
How much cholesterol your liver makes sort of depends on what resources it has available to it, to build the cholesterol out of, and how motivated it is to build cholesterol.
If you eat foods high in cholesterol and a variety of fats (such as trans-fats or saturated fats), then the liver doesn’t have to expend much energy to make that stuff into new cholesterol molecules. A motivated liver can churn this stuff out fairly readily with little effort.
If your diet is higher in mono and polyunsaturated fats, that’s a bit more work for the liver to build it. The average liver makes less, in these circumstances
If you are on a very low fat diet, your liver has to work even harder, building the damn stuff out of proteins and carbohydrates. Most livers will ask themselves “how much of this crap do we really really need to make?” and do the minimum.
Meaningful change in cholesterol levels, either due to diet or medication, generally takes a few weeks to see. Average cholesterol production in a human is less than a gram a day, which approximately equals cholesterol loss per day via excretion from the liver in the form of bile. So a single meal, even if it’s pure lard, isn’t going to alter the balance that quick.
Keep it up though, and in weeks your cholesterol levels will begin to rise as your liver gets used to the rich stream of quick and easy building blocks for making new cholesterol.
Triglycerides, on the other hand, can spike quite highly with the ingestion of a single fat-rich meal. But that’s a whole 'nuther question.
Thanks, **QtM, **your explanation was helpful to me. 