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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.
Wait a week, there will be new advice.
After all these years with conflicting nutrition advice, I've come to the conclusion that we have no idea what we're talking about when it comes to the human body. Sure; we're pretty sure about the big things, but the details still throw us.
Avoid the processed crap, get some exercise...that's pretty much the best you can do.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
In my 43 years eggs have gone from:
1. Healthy
2. Terrible. They will kill you!
3. Maybe not so bad, cholesterol intake isn't what causes high cholesteral.
4. Terrible! Three or more a week will kill you!
Also dietary advice has gone from.
1. Fat is good for you! Drink whole milk!
2. Fat is the devil! Eat rice cakes.
3. Actually, forget that last part. Carbs are the real problem.
4. Well, if you eat fat you might lose weight but have a sick heart.
5. The FDA food pyramid is for raising livestock! Eat real food.
6. No carbs! Keto baby!
What the hell are we supposed to do with this information? Seriously! No wonder there is such a distrust of experts in the USA!
"People who eat an added three or four eggs a week or 300 milligrams of dietary cholesterol per day" "a single large egg contains about 186 milligrams of cholesterol" So, if a single egg contains 186 mg of cholesterol, how does three or four eggs a week add up to 300 mg per day???
No, there is never new advice. The advice is always the same; eat a traditional diet with lots of fruits, vegetables, fiber, and whole grains, limit sugars, fats, and highly processed foods.
The study is being misrepresented in the media to focus on eggs, even though it looked at total cholesterol not eggs. They're taking numbers for cholesterol, telling you how many eggs they think that is equivalent to, and then using wording that tricks the media into saying "eggs" in the headlines. This isn't even about eggs. And it contradicts a lot of past research. And it is based on what people report about their eating habits, which is not even scientific.
It may be, for example, that people who eat more than 1lb of breakfast sausage per week tend to under-report it. It may also be true that people who report eating 2 or more eggs per day are more likely to eat breakfast sausage. There is all sorts of problems like this when you go by what people report that they ate.
From everything you read about nutritional research, it's important to remember that unlike nearly all areas of science, they perform no actual rigorous research on this. Instead, it's meta-analysis of self-reported data that hunts and seeks patterns (instead of coming up with a hypothesis and then testing it).
In many cases, it's meta-analysis of meta-analyses.
In none of the nutritional research studies presented do they create control groups where they accurately measure and monitor all food consumed and report it over a lifetime. It's just nearly impossible. So instead, any sort of nutritional results get completely caught up with household income, other food being eaten, genetic predisposition and just plain garbage data.
Perhaps people who eat 2+ eggs per day are having them via egg sandwiches with bacon, cheese and white bread while sipping coffee. The actual causes could be those other things (bacon, cheese, coffee) rather than the eggs themselves.
I think it's important to note that this study had a 21% death rate, that implies the participates where older individuals. Looking at the actual study, it says that the mean age at the start of the trial was 51.6 years old. The median study follow-up was 17.5 years, so the mean age at the end of the study was 69.1 years old.
While this study is indeed interesting, I would like to see another study involving healthy young and middle aged adults.
A few years ago I was listening to a lecture on TED (can't remember which) by a neuroscientist. He said when you hear about a study reported in the press, ignore it because it's wrong.
For example, years ago people were buying Mozart CDs for their babies and it turned out to be nothing. The trouble with our science reporting is that these studies come out and are hyped beyond belief. People make lifestyle changes and it turns out it was for nothing and in some cases detrimental.
On the other hand, if making lifestyle changes makes your life and the world a better place, then by all means do it regardless of the science - like global warming. Doing what we can to reduce global warming only has an upside and no downsides - unless one insists on subsidizing coal miners and the fossil fuel industry. Oh, and the rednecks who like internal combustion engines that spew black smoke to "stick it to the libs" or whatever it is they think they are doing in their little worlds.
Scientists Continue Waffling on Eggs
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
If they weren't, the news would say "People who eat 3+ eggs a week also have higher risk of heart disease, but association w/ eggs disappears when controlling for other cholesterol intake."
See https://twitter.com/juliaonjob... for context.
There are two kinds of cholesterols depending on the kind of cholesterol containers (lipoproteins) is cholesterol transported in: LDL (low-density lipoprotein), sometimes called “bad” cholesterol and HDL (high-density lipoprotein), or “good” cholesterol. Lipoproteins' walls, as you can guess from the name, are made of proteins. When your diet lacks proteins or has too much cholesterol compared to proteins, then your organism produces more low-density lipoproteins (LDL) which have greater capacity but much thinner walls. This is when the atherosclerosis starts. But when your diet contains enough proteins you'll be fine. Eggs have very high biological protein value among natural products and that amount of protein is much more than enough to compensate the cholesterol. This study might have methodological flaws since many other studies didn't show such findings, some even showed the opposite.
This is one of many examples of the media taking a study and trumpeting grand conclusions that aren't supported by the data, or if they are, ignoring contradictory studies and potentially confounding variables (which might well have been discussed at length in the actual study). The problem isn't so much that these meta-analyses are being done- they might well be worthwhile to read for scientists looking for additional research topics, but the fact that they are being reported as if the grand council of science has weighed the evidence and come to a final definitive conclusion. This tends to undermine public trust in science. Worse, you see it in reporters who supposedly focus on science reporting. The problem is the media is in the business of attracting eyeballs, and an accurate report about one of these meta-analysis studies wouldn't attract many.
"Eggs, specially the yolk, are a major source of dietary cholesterol,"
so? Dietary cholesterol isn't the cause of heart heart desease. It's like saying: ban fire trucks, at every fire we see fire trucks, so they must be responsible for the fires.
The study probably has problems with confounding factors: People who eat many eggs, ignoring dieteay advice, tend ot ignore other advice (like exercise, don't smoke and so on), which is the real reason for their higher/earlier death and disease events. This is just a guess, though. Didn't look.
The dietary heart hypothesis has been debunked. It was fake news by the seed oil industry. Read Nina Teichholz.
Repeat after me: "dietary cholesterol has no statistically significant effect on serum cholesterol." Take your bullshit study and shove it. "Doctor" (scare quotes because he had a doctorate but was turbo full of shit) Ancel Keys could almost single-handedly be blamed for the abysmal state of the American diet today. All evidence presented since Ancel Keys's time show that eggs are one of the absolute best things you can possibly consume, especially the yolk. I'm so sick of this bullshit. Saturated fats are good for you, unsaturated fats are not so good for you, eggs are extremely good for you, red meat is extremely good for you, simple sugars and refined carbohydrates are the worst thing you can eat, carbs in general are only good for you in small, limited amounts, and low-fat foods have poor satiety which leads to overeating (ignoring the fact that many low-fat foods have added sugar to make up for the lost taste.)
Any study that says eggs will kill you faster is pulling a big fat "correlation = causation" fallacy. My best guess is that the guys who died earlier and ate more eggs also ate a lot more biscuits and cereal and extra slices of toast with jelly, but hey now, let's not control for THAT shit, guys, we're ONLY interested in a headline. They even say in the damn study that they cobbled together piles of data from six different places that were collected starting from 1985, but I have no way of discovering how that data was collected or what it contained or what they controlled for because the actual study text is locked up behind a fucking paywall like so much science seems to be.
you'd hope they would have controlled for that...
Which is pretty much impossible to do. There are some statistical methods to control for confounding variables, but they only work properly if all these variables are: 1) linear, 2) independent, and 3) time-invariant. In practice, none of these three conditions hold not even close. In addition, not all confounding variables are identified and measured, and the ones that are measured, aren't measured accurately (they use crude questionnaires)
Of course, researchers can choose to ignore the limitations, and simply use their statistics package to run the 'control' command, and claim they have controlled for variables.
If a researcher is biased (thank god this never happens), it's also easy to experiment with different kinds of data selection until you get the results you want.