I feel like you're omitting some key points here. You say they ate meat and dairy every day. Practically everybody eats meat and dairy every day, but not everybody has high cholesterol or an increased risk of heart disease (note that those are separate concerns, as CVD happens in people with low cholesterol as well). If I have a glass of milk with cereal in the morning, and a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch on white bread, I've already had two servings of dairy and a serving of meat. But I've also had one or two servings of a sugary breakfast cereal and two slices of white bread (both of which are about as nutritionally void as candy). Those are the really harmful factors here.

I believe you when you say they lost weight on an all plant diet. But I think you're probably attributing their success to the wrong thing. Correlation != causation. People on a diet would never dream of having refined carbohydrates or too much sugar, because those are universally understood to be bad for you (even if it's just the 'empty calories' argument). They just so happened to also stop eating any animal products. So I don't think you can target the meat and dairy and just claim that removing them is "probably the healthiest option for the majority of the population". Rotten thinking like this is what got us into this catastrophic obesity epidemic in the first place.

> Plenty of peer-reviewed studies. There is no denying that dietary cholesterol is a killer and cutting out meat and dairy is probably the healthiest option for the majority of the population.

Yeah, except that the pendulum is swinging the other way now. http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/panel-suggests-stop-warni...

"There’s a growing consensus among nutrition scientists that cholesterol in food has little effect on the amount of cholesterol in the bloodstream. And that’s the cholesterol that matters."

which is exactly the phenomenon GGP commenter zython was describing.

edit: "dietary cholesterol != blood cholesterol" was even in the popular culture ca. 1995, see "Homer the Great" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OZkCXbbEJw

It doesn't has as high an effect as saturated fat, no, but it still has a negative effect, and fact of the matter is that we need to consume zero dietary cholesterol, so every time we do, that is a negative action towards the goal of health.

Another thing to note is that often the case is that food that is high in cholesterol is also high in saturated fat, both things that affect ldl cholesterol levels in a negative way.