The Story
Cholesterol is the fatty stuff that clogs up your arteries and gives you strokes and heart attacks.
If you eat food that contains a lot of cholesterol, the stuff will clog up your arteries and you'll die.
So obviously avoiding food that contains cholesterol is good for your health.
Facts
Cholesterol in our diet has little or no effect on the level of cholesterol in our blood. (Eating carrots or chicken doesn't cause us to have high levels of carrot or chicken in our blood.)
Nearly all the cholesterol in our blood is produced by our own livers.
Why
The advertising industry is always looking for new ways to market their products, some catchy way of making them look new, improved, or in some way better than others.
Being able to label a package of food as cholesterol free
guarantees higher sales, whether or not its containing cholesterol makes any real difference.
The food industry funded many scientific studies proving that cholesterol is a killer, and defunded researchers that could produce different results. The surviving studies re-enforce the advertising.
Scientists get funding so they can publish research papers, the advertising industry has a powerful buzzword, and low-cholesterol products sell better than ever. Everyone wins.