Eggs

joolsmd wrote: »

From NHS.uk:

"There is no recommended limit on how many eggs people should eat. Eggs can be enjoyed as part of a healthy, balanced diet, but it's best to cook them without adding salt or fat."

You will prise my eggs from my cold dead hands. Not sure if there is a health scare where you are but in the UK you can binge on eggs if you want. (Disclaimer for this site: Please ensure your binge is within your calorie limit )

That may be very well true but the most current research which came out this week is saying not to eat more than 1 a day ...... again.

Who knows what to believe with eggs anymore?

joolsmd wrote: »

Lillymoo01 wrote: »

Who knows what to believe with eggs anymore?

Indeed!! Still, I eat 2 eggs a day, and my latest health check had my cholesterol etc in the normal range, so until they make them illegal I'll keep eating 'em.

I concur!

I love eggs! I try to eat 2 every other day. I like their protein status and my cholesterol has always been good. I say if eggs are within your goals then just eat in moderation.

Fuzzipeg wrote: »

I wonder where you are finding your information. Eggs are highly nutritious, like milk they contain everything required to sustain a living being, after all that is what fertilised eggs will be. Most of the information I read years ago was about cholesterol levels, its now been realised how fundamental cholesterol is to our lives and if the body does not have enough cholesterol it is capable of making up the requirements. I realise there can be issues within the endocrine system which can cause excess to be made but those conditions are less frequent. As long as the number of eggs you consume falls within the calorific/dietary component healthy balance for protein, fats, minerals etc, its all to the good.

It's been all over the news the past few days, about how eggs may in fact not be that great for you. There's a thread going on in the Debate section about it.

There was one recent study that showed a possible link in egg consumption and increased mortality. It was far from definitive though, and there has been prior research that contradicted this. So while it was interesting and worthy of further study, there was no need to go crazy in regards to eggs based off of it.

Unfortunately, the media was like "OMG, eggs will kill youz nows," without any sort of nuance or proper context. That is why everyone is overreacting to it.

Diet research is notoriously difficult, since it is observational, which makes it hard to pin down specific causes. For instance, did eggs cause an increase in mortality, or did people who ate eggs also happen to engage in other activities that caused this mortality increase, so the like was correlated, but not causative? That's why a lot of times it can seem like studies have conflicting conclusions.

For me personally, it would take a lot more than that one study to cause me to give up eggs. And it's important to remember, that everything in life is about opportunity cost. Even if eggs do have some sort of negative health effect associated with them, I know personally that if I wasn't eating them, I would be probably eating something that was "worse" for me, at the very least in the sense that these things had more calories and will slow my weight loss. Obesity is the one thing we are sure of that causes a whole bunch of health and mortality issues.

PS - longest lived woman ever ate 3 eggs a day. Died at 117

I interpreted the report as saying be careful if you are concerned about cholesterol. Some people are and some are not - depends on overall eating habits and genetics. I do have to watch it but eat only 4 eggs a week.
Looking at personal examples such as a 117 year old woman is not applicable. You need to know your own medical history and heredity also.

Ok, but even the abstract says that the association was no longer significant once adjusted for total cholesterol.

So the study found that people who eat more cholesterol had more cardiac events.

I guess whether it is relevant is whether this was independent of other risk factors, and how significant it was once the other risk factors such as lack of exercise and obesity were equalized.

And by significant here I don't mean statistically significant but rather along the lines of an extra 1 in 1000 people were affected solely because they consumed cholesterol in excess of ????

marcusjgrose wrote: »

I've been eating 13 a day for a couple of years,I'm still alive.

I like eggs.
I enjoy a fairly high TDEE compared to many people on this site.
I don't like eggs enough to devote more than 1000 Calories a day to them.

So good luck with that

As to the level of cholesterol which is significant for each of as as individuals, I found a discussion with a cardiac surgeon who had just performed a double by-pass on a relative who had NORMAL levels of blood cholesterol to be somewhat interesting: "it is not whether the level of cholesterol was too high in terms of population averages that matters, it is that for this individual that particular level of cholesterol was too high for her and enough to lead to blockages"

A second interesting point, which I already mentioned up-thread, is that even in the abstract the study in question mentions that once total cholesterol has been taken into account there was no finding of statistical significance when it came to whether the people had eaten more eggs. In other words, in my mind, their statistical finding was in terms of total dietary cholesterol.

lynn_glenmont wrote: »

I'm hoping to see something that undercuts the analysis's conclusion. I eat a fair amount of eggs (I would say one to two eggs three to four times a week, and three eggs a couple of times a month), and not so much meat, so eggs and dairy are my major source of cholesterol. I just looked at my MFP report for cholesterol, and I've been under 300 mg dietary cholesterol only 29 of the past 90 days (plus 3 days over 1000 mg of cholesterol!). Since my serum cholesterol numbers come back in the OK to good range for the most part, I haven't worried about it. But with this direct connection between dietary cholesterol and mortality risk/CVD incidence, good serum cholesterol numbers apparently don't matter.

Still, this is a small percentage increased risk from the base risk. Around 6000 people of the nearly 30,000 had died at the (average) 17 year follow-up, or 20%. So if you have 300 mg of dietary cholesterol a day, you move from having a roughly 20% chance of dying in the next 17 years (from all causes -- average age of participant at start was 51 years) to a roughly 22% of dying during that time. I think I'm going to wait for more studies or analyses to confirm this before I worry about

Just realized I put the decimal point in the wrong place in that calculation. (too late to edit my post)

If you have 300 mg of dietary cholesterol a day, you move from having a roughly 20% chance of dying in the next 17 years (from all causes -- average age of participant at start was 51 years) to a roughly 20.2% of dying during that time, not 22%, as I said above.

I eat three EVERY SINGLE DAY, and my cholesterol is in target range!