PrintBy Shawn McKee
eDiets Contributor
It’s time to bring these egg injustices to light, to tell the truth about America’s big breakfast bargain, and put to rest some of the rumors that have plagued the egg.
The reputation of the egg was first cracked in the 1960s when researchers initially made the connection between heart disease and high cholesterol levels in the blood. The American Heart Association (AHA) set a limit for daily cholesterol intake at 300 mg a day (less if you have heart disease) and suggested avoiding the consumption of egg yolks.
An egg has about 215 mg of cholesterol, which nearly exhausts a person’s daily allowance for cholesterol, so it made sense to avoid egg yolks as that is where the cholesterol dwells. However, this anti-egg effort was based on the logical-but-false assumption that cholesterol in food converted directly into cholesterol levels in the blood.
An egg is high in cholesterol, but all that cholesterol does not go directly to your bloodstream and arteries. Actually, in healthy people only a small amount of the cholesterol in food passes directly into the blood. In fact, most of the cholesterol that circulates in the blood is created by the liver in response to saturated and trans fats in the diet.
That’s no yolk.
In a classic study by Harvard cardiologist Paul Dudley White that dates back to 1950, the experiment shows the amount of cholesterol in food generally has a small impact on cholesterol in the blood.
The largest study to analyze the impact of egg consumption on heart disease found no connection between the two. Almost 120,000 initially healthy men and women were tracked, and those who ate one or more eggs a day were no more likely to have had a heart attack, stroke or to have died of cardiovascular disease over a 14-year study period than those who ate less than one egg per week. (People with diabetes who regularly consumed eggs were more likely to develop heart disease than their egg abstaining counterparts.)
The Hardboiled Facts
Since the nasty rumors that have been circulating about this oblate spheroid (fancy math lingo for egg-shaped) turned out to crack under pressure, the question then becomes: What’s so great about eggs?
Eggs are inexpensive and loaded with nutritional benefits. For about a dime, an egg has 6 grams of protein, healthful unsaturated fats, key vitamins and minerals such as iron and riboflavin, and it is low in saturated fats and free of trans fats. Eggs are also a good source of choline, which has been linked with preserving memory, and lutein and zeaxanthin, which may protect against vision loss.
One little egg is packed with essential amino acids and protein. In fact, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations classifies eggs as the highest protein source available.
If you still must be cautious in your cholesterol consumption due to diabetes or a previous condition but want a cheap source of protein, try using one whole egg and two whites in your omelet. This will greatly reduce the cholesterol in the eggs, but maintain the high protein levels (over half of the protein in eggs is in the white).
Now that you know eggs-actly what you’re getting in your omelet, spread the word about this often misunderstood food. Maybe it’s the mysterious origins of the egg or just a lack of information available to the public, but — either way — it’s time to stand up for a food that was laid down only to be scrambled up.
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