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Three or More Eggs a Week Increase Your Risk of Heart Disease and Early Death, Study Says (cnn.com)
It's been debated for years: Are eggs good or bad for you? People who eat an added three or four eggs a week or 300 milligrams of dietary cholesterol per day, have a higher risk of both heart disease and early death compared with those who eat fewer eggs, new research finds. From a report: "Eggs, specially the yolk, are a major source of dietary cholesterol," wrote Victor Zhong, lead study author and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. In a study published this month in the medical journal JAMA, he and his colleagues noted that a single large egg contains about 186 milligrams of cholesterol. The researchers examined data from six US study groups including more than 29,000 people followed for 17 and a half years on average. Over the follow-up period, a total of 5,400 cardiovascular events occurred, including 1,302 fatal and nonfatal strokes, 1,897 incidents of fatal and nonfatal heart failure and 113 other heart disease deaths. An additional 6,132 participants died of other causes. Consuming an additional 300 milligrams of dietary cholesterol per day was associated with a 3.2% higher risk of heart disease and a 4.4% higher risk of early death, Zhong's analysis of the data showed. And each additional half an egg consumed per day was associated with a 1.1% higher risk of cardiovascular disease and 1.9% higher risk of early death due to any cause, the researchers found.
The study is being misrepresented in the media to focus on eggs, even though it looked at total cholesterol not eggs.
No, it looked at both additional cholesterol and additional eggs, independently:
Findings Among 29615 adults pooled from 6 prospective cohort studies in the United States with a median follow-up of 17.5 years, each additional 300 mg of dietary cholesterol consumed per day was significantly associated with higher risk of incident CVD (adjusted hazard ratio [HR], 1.17; adjusted absolute risk difference [ARD], 3.24%) and all-cause mortality (adjusted HR, 1.18; adjusted ARD, 4.43%), and each additional half an egg consumed per day was significantly associated with higher risk of incident CVD (adjusted HR, 1.06; adjusted ARD, 1.11%) and all-cause mortality (adjusted HR, 1.08; adjusted ARD, 1.93%).
A large sample size won't winnow-out and differences, because that assumes that the variables are independently varying, which they are not.
If "bacon and eggs" is a common meal, then just taking a bigger sample size won't winnow-out the effect of bacon vs the effect of eggs. This is because the consumption of bacon and the consumption of eggs are interlinked, they're not independently varying. They'd need to do a study on eggs which adjusted for other lifestyle factors and see what incremental difference each egg makes for someone who otherwise eats and exercises the same amount. This study doesn't seem to make any adjustment for that.