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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!
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.
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.