"Conclusions: Our analysis suggests that higher consumption of eggs (more than 1 egg/day) was not associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease, but was associated with a significant reduction in risk of coronary artery disease."
When I was a kid, for a few years, I had a stepmom who was relatively high educated, and was very quick to pivot to the healthy diet of the 90s: grains for breakfast, pasta for dinner.
When I would spend the night out, and come home and talk about how much I loved the breakfast at my friend's house (eggs and bacon) she would call them "ignorant rednecks" and talk about how "some people are just too dumb to listen to science or doctors."
My "redneck" friends has a much healthier diet than I did. We know this now. Yet people still blindly trust the US public health authorities. I'm not a moron, so I don't inherently mistrust their statements either. I just think a healthy skepticism is warranted with US public health messaging and the science that they fund. Entire careers in academia were flushed down the toilet because a brave few tried to point out how incredibly flawed the "dietary cholesterol causes heart disease" narrative.
Think about this: the leading scientists and the scientific community in the 1990s strongly believed that both eggs and avocados strongly increased the risk of heart disease. Avocados. Bad for your health.......... Looking at our collective love of avocados today, it should be a highly publicized rebuke of how awful the FDA's food pyramid campaign was.
Saw a movie back in I think the seventies that involved a time traveler coming back to present day America. He's happily eating what was regarded at the time as a very unhealthy diet and is horrified at all the people eating what we all thought was the healthy choice. It was a comedic punchline throughout the movie.
I dropped eating eggs for thirty years because we were all lied to by the experts. But as a result it brings me sheer joy to eat eggs for breakfast every single day - at my doctors recommendation ;<).
What the experts should have warned us about was our sugar intake. I have reduced mine, it's not that difficult, and only wish I had known to do so decades ago.
> Saw a movie back in I think the seventies that involved a time traveler coming back to present day America. He's happily eating what was regarded at the time as a very unhealthy diet and is horrified at all the people eating what we all thought was the healthy choice. It was a comedic punchline throughout the movie.
You are probably talking about Woody Allen's "Sleeper".
for a less comedic take, take daniel quinn's jellyfish parable in ishmael, an adventure of mind and spirit.
an anthropoligst visits an alien planet and talks to a jellyfish about its cultures creation myth. indignant, the jellyfish recoil - they have no such myth, only a scientific account as rational creatures. obviously, agrees the researcher; did life first appear on land or sea? confused, the jellyfish ask what is meant. well, the researcher, says, was the first life here or over there (pointing past the shore inland). the jellyfish are more confused - there is nothing past the shoreline. that is the edge of the great bowl that holds the ocean.
it is a simple tale, but its simplicity is somehow lost on most of our population, both scientific and otherwise. the idea that we're at the pinnacle of knowledge for anything is very silly.
operate with assumptions, but dont pretend theyre not assumptions. we're still learning.
Slightly tangential, but your mom might have reduced your height. I recall reading a study a few years ago that found a strong correlation between high protein for breakfast and the length of the femur.
Not to get too political, but now do masks/HCQ/covid. It's just tricky. In the end, many "scientists"- and _especially_ science reporters are too confident, and many "armchair scientists" are as well. We should all try to do the best we can to follow the science, keep a healthy dose of skepticism, and be kind and understanding of people who may land on different opinions than us. Imagine if your stepmom had said "I've seen differing studies on this topic, and just come down on the side that bacon and eggs are bad" as opposed to "everybody who disagrees with me is an ignorant redneck". Will leave it to the reader to apply that to today's topic du jur.
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying but I’m going to nitpick and say a breakfast of bacon and eggs is not healthier than a breakfast of grains depending on what those grains are. White bread vs bacon, debatable. But oatmeal/quinoa is obviously healthier than bacon. I don’t think there are any government agencies pushing the idea that bacon is part of a healthy diet
I really don't think you can say definitely that oatmeal is a better breakfast for a growing child than bacon. Oatmeal is tons of empty carbs that will be burned fast, cause an acute insulin response, and ultimately provide less critical protein to a growing child.
> Oatmeal is tons of empty carbs that will be burned fast
This is completely false. Oatmeal is one of the few grains where this is not true (unless you’re eating it in a highly processed form like flour). It is very slow to digest, does not cause an insulin spike, and actually removes cholesterol from the body. As far as grains go, it’s pretty much the best one out there. There’s a reason oatmeal is the primary carb used by gym rats.
The only time it’s a problem is if you’re eating it out of an instant packet, but that’s really about all the added sugar, not the oatmeal grain.
> It is very slow to digest, does not cause an insulin spike
Where do these statements come from? What counts as "slow" or "fast" digestion? Oats, being rich in carbohydrates, definitely affect insulin. As one example, this 2019 paper clearly shows that overnight oats elicit glycemic and insulin responses, so it's patently false to claim that oatmeal "does not cause an insulin spike": https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-018-0329-1#Fig2
> There’s a reason oatmeal is the primary carb used by gym rats.
Gym rats say and do a lot of things without scientific merit. That's why the term "broscience" exists.
> The only time it’s a problem is if you’re eating it out of an instant packet, but that’s really about all the added sugar, not the oatmeal grain.
It's not just the added sugar. Instant oats are more processed than steel-cut or rolled oats, and they do have a higher glycemic index.
> In general, the more highly processed a food is, or the quicker a food is digested, the higher the GI. For example, instant oats have a higher GI than steel cut oats.
Anecdotally (to add to EForEndeavour's post) I can disagree with this.
I've had plain oats with non-sugar additives (eg pure cocoa powder, seeds) and it definitely causes a spike, and my heart rate goes through the roof. Incidentally this happened more when I forgot to add cinnamon, which explains [1]. This was even with the fancier (read: double price half volume) steel cut or rolled varieties.
Oats are good, but as with most things not necessarily for everyone.
Also it's important to remember that different foods affect different individals' insulin responses very differently. Seems to be linked to gut microbiome and potentially genetics. The food that's better for the average adult might be worse for you.
I don’t think the above poster can say that bacon is better than grains considering they’re full of saturated fat, sodium, and nitrates. Oatmeal is also not “empty carbs” it has a lot of fiber, protein, and nutrients
Bacon and other processed meats are listed as a group 1 carcinogen, along with smoking and asbestos. This is due to the nitrate content (which gets converted to nitrosamines during cooking).
Nitrates and Nitrites are the leading culprit for red meat causing cancer. There is bacon that is cured without them. It's just that they are added to most bacon and almost all processed red meats.
No, there really isn't. What we have is bacon producers using a loophole to use 'natural' nitrates from things like celery for curing. They're the exact same molecule and perform the same function, but because they used processed celery juice instead of pure sodium nitrite, they get to claim they're nitrate free.
Ok, yes, I should’ve said there is bacon without them. Cured bacon still containing the natural nitrates are a good point, but there is uncured bacon that doesn’t contain nitrates.[0]
Sugar? In bacon? Why?? Get rid of that crap. Give me bacon that contains only pork and salt, please.
I recently read the label for a bag of popcorn which had sugar as the first ingredient, before corn. That popcorn had more sugar than corn. Boggles the mind.
It's yet another garbage regression study observing populations.
I'm fully aware that statins work to prevent heart attacks by lowering the LDL in the blood, but that's because they treat a symptom rather than the root cause triggering the body to use lipids to repair arterial walls in the first place. Why does the body deposit lipids on arterial walls? Because when arterial walls get damaged in any way, the body uses lipids to repair them.
There is a specific sub-type of LDL that is not dietary in source, called VLDL.
VLDL is created by the liver in response to consumption of carbohydrates, fructose, etc. It is very important to note that VLDL is NOT created by the liver in response to consuming animal fats. The patty and cheese with no bun won't affect your VLDL amounts. The bun, the fries, and the soda? They will trigger your liver to produce VLDL.
VLDL is the chief culprit in damaging arterial walls, and causing general inflammation in the body, when at unnaturally high levels. If you consume juice or soda on any kind of regular basis, your VLDL levels will spike afterwards.
After VLDL damages those arterial walls, it, along with normal LDL, will be deposited on the walls and harden.
The above explanation is why when people talk about having "high cholesterol", it is often useless in predicting heart attacks. The most important marker on a blood test for predicting heart attacks is the ratio of triglycerides to HDL in the blood stream. Notice that LDL isn't in the ratio. Why? Because the higher the amount of triglycerides in the blood, the higher the ratio, and the more VLDL a person has in their blood relative to HDL.
1) Observational regression studies are often useless, because it's impossible to remove so many factors such as the "doesn't listen to doctors" effect where a person who goes against prevailing medical wisdom and eats red meat will engage in other behaviors that doctors advise against, like smoking.
2) It's not the meat in the meat and potatoes diet that is the root cause of heart disease. No, it's a horrible combination of the two: The potatoes trigger the release of VLDL, which damages and inflames the arteries, and the meat contains normal LDL that typically wouldn't lodge in arterial walls, but is used in conjunction with VLDL by the body to repair the now damaged walls. Eat just the meet? No VLDL. The LDL you consume in the meat doesn't damage the arterial walls.
Just a note: In the past, I've been a vegan who consumed zero animal products. I didn't consume a single bite of animal products between 2002-2006. I'm not a blind defender of meat based diets, and I won't pretend that there aren't environmental implications of meat consumption. I just don't think it's useful to allow bad science to get people to eat less meat. I'm formally educated in statistics from studying Applied Economics, and I've worked professionally as a data scientist for 8 years now. I'm keenly aware of how bad these observational regression studies are. I'm not saying don't take them into account or use them, but they really need to be vetted when they conflict with longitudinal studies like Framingham.
The food pyramid is an enduring icon of institutional incompetence.
What they should have done instead is mandate the use of the term "lipids" instead of "fat" on nutrition labels. Vocabulary could do so much to solve our problems. We are a nation of fat people who think that eating fat makes you fat. Then we also think that eating cholesterol gives us high cholesterol.
We use a different word for a cow when it's on our dinner plate but we can't do the same for fat? I guess this idea doesn't give the graphic designer anything to do.
It's ironic that now that a study comes out that supports your view, you accept it, but when the big studies said something opposite people were just "blindly trust the US public health authorities".
You are making assumptions that I wasn't skeptical of this study. I am. This study has pretty strong data behind it, and a much more rigorous methodology than studies which were literally foundational to Ansel Keys' lipid hypothesis that are borderline fraudulent in how the data was manipulated.
The study which had the strongest impact on my opinions with dietary fat consumption was the longitudinal Framingham Heart Study. It's far, far more rigorous (and expensive) than virtually any of the studies being crapped out by the publish or perish grant-chasers. The absolute vitriol and emotional, irrational responses to the contradictions raised by Framingham really taught me lessons about the fashion-driven, corrupt nature of certain communities in academia.
I've got news for you. There never were any (well done) big studies that said the opposite. However, there were health authorities that repeated really bad "science" because it supported their preconceived notions.
The only logical thing to do is to follow current scientific consensus the best we can. Adjust ourselves as those views adjust.
Anything else is just pure ego saying that you know better than experts. Random examples where you were "right" or the scientific consensus was "wrong" are irrelevant.
Edit: I'm just saying that the scientific method is the best tool we have for this kind of stuff, even with the bias and flaws of the studies. It's miles and miles better than Facebook-esque anecdotes about rednecks eating bacon.
Ah, there's the problem. The scientific method is great, but it doesn't apply itself. It's scientists that are the problem. Scientists are only human.
Let's do an experiment. Or better, let's do a Gedankenexperiment so we sound more like experts:
Look around your (virtual) workplace. See that well-spoken idiot who you know is wrong about everything, but who somehow gets the attention and the money to run whatever projects they want? That's the expert.
You are not the expert, even though you know more stuff, because nobody asks you. And when you insisted they were wrong, they got rid of you.
The same thing happens everywhere, in academia, science, government, medicine... everywhere. We are only human.
But not to worry! It's all right. Thanks to the scientific method science actually advances, even if it's one funeral at a time. Just be careful who you trust.
Be very careful about how you word stuff like this, even if at the end of the day it's just healthy skepticism. It's the same vibe that gives power to conspiracy theories.
Their comment didn't sound anti-science to me at all. They're critical of academia and how that functions. SMBC had a comic on this recently that illustrates the difference, the issues, and possible improvements: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/science-fictions
I'm very pro science. But science is very hard to do properly, and even when done it's very hard to find it.
Pop science articles you read online, written by journalists? At best just clickbait. (I read them too. Only human...)
Unfortunately there is no substitute to thinking for yourself. The best way to start is with the question "does it work?". If the question doesn't make sense no need to carry on, we're off science altogether.
The mistake is when one assumes that the things they read on media outlets and on TV are anywhere close to a 'scientific consensus' in an area such as nutrition.
Correct, I didn't intend it as a critique of you specifically, but rather something that I see a lot of others do, so I apologize for the overly-direct wording (edited it to make this more clear).
Scientific studies aren't gospel. They can be affected by the sensibilities of grant agencies, funding from industry, flawed experiment design, and p-hacking, among others.
Peter Norvig's essay on experiment design comes to mind:
The current alternative to scientific studies (with their varying degrees of bias and flaws) are Facebook-esque anecdotes about rednecks eating bacon that apparently are so compelling that they get upvoted to the top of HN.
The "facebook-esque anecdote" was intended to point out the failings of acting as if scientific institutions are practicing science in a pure, non-biased way and blindly trusting the humans in these institutions to not be subject to corrupting influences. My stepmother's god-like idolatry of the scientific method was conflated with the very flawed humans who were supposed to be using the scientific method.
Your original point is a fair one, but you probably aren't aware of the fact that, on this specific topic, the leading scientists in the human nutrition field were extremely aggressive in crushing all dissenting voices, including destroying the career of a researcher at Harvard who was relegated to obscurity despite later being proven correct.
Dissent against Keys' lipid hypothesis of any form was career suicide in the human nutrition community. The viciousness of the attacks against dissenters was particularly remarkable, due to the fervent belief that undermining the "fat is bad" narrative would kill people.
They were wrong, and your point of view assumes that it's self-correcting over the long-term, so don't argue. In the case of the lipid hypothesis, it wasn't self-correcting at all. It's been a decades long fight to try to get a bunch of smug asshole academics to admit they fucked over the public for decades with their hubris.
>The only logical thing to do is to follow current scientific consensus the best we can.
Until you figure out that most 'scientists' are morons, and are biased/ignorant/academic. An anecdote from an observant, meticulous, objective layman is far more dependable than the gobbledygook that characterizes most published research.
Aggressive conformists demand religious adherence to established institutions, because the institutions are a source of comfort to them. The parent poster comes off like an inquisitor silencing heretics, because that's exactly what he thinks he's doing. Sure, this heretic might have a point, but the Church must be protected AT ALL COSTS.
Incorrect, and you're starting to fly off the rails here.
It's fine to critique studies and findings. It's not okay to say that you or your facebook friends know better and can substitute your own thoughts on a subject. That is how we get Covid deniers or vaccine conspiracy theories or the million other misinformation issues we have right now.
Regarding nutrition: this view is great until you define "science" as whatever advice your doctor gives you.
The problem is that there have been plenty of studies long before these more enlightened times we live in, which demonstrated that saturated animal fats, eggs, salt, and red meat are good for you, whereas high-grain and starch diets, seed oils, sugar, and hydrogenated fats are bad for you.
And what happened? These studies went against the FDA guidelines and the nutritional training of an entire generations of MDs, and thus were ignored and ridiculed. This resulted in a massive increase in type-2 diabetes, obesity, and heart disease.
We like to think that the medical experts we rely upon follow the science. They don't. To this day, the majority of MDs in the US follow the 60 year old guidelines that killed so many people prematurely. Despite the resounding preponderance of the evidence.
And it doesn't end there. The same is true for related areas like the whole cholesterol debacle that ignores HDL/LDL ratios, and especially ignores blood calcium levels. Even when they know better, i.e., when the research shows that high cholesterol in a healthy ratio with low to non-existent blood calcium levels is perfectly healthy and does not need treatment, they will still prescribe statins, or tell such patients to cut out red meat and eggs. This is not following the science, even while acknowledging that the patient is already healthy.
The same story with carnivore diets and diabetes. Even when the tests show that the patient has a vastly improved blood glucose count on a carnivore diet, i.e., they are getting healthier, and the doctor sees it and admits it, and he is aware of research which found the same correlation, he will still insist that they need to go back to eating a predominantly grain-based diet, because his training, and the peer pressure from his colleagues are overriding the science.
Because of this, it is up to you to find doctors who actually follow the science. They are out there. You just have to look for them.
When I was in Scouting in the mid 80's, we had an adult leader who would only let us bring one egg per person on weekend camping trips. He was maniacal about how bad eggs are for you. Imaging two dozen 13 year old boys running though the woods and all they had to eat was one scrambled egg and half pound of burnt bacon each.
When you want two dozen eggs, but you can only bring a single egg, choose ostrich. If each of the two dozen boys would like 3 normal eggs, they can share 3 ostrich eggs. Since each boy can bring one egg, 8 such meals are possible. For a weekend trip, everybody could subsist purely on eggs.
Keep in mind this study might not be about egg consumption but rather the overall risk of disease in those who happen to eat more eggs than other people. A lot of people who eat several eggs a day are also going to the gym to try to build muscle mass.
When I was in middle school they had the food guide pyramid which recommended 13 servings of grain, such as cereal, a day. It was just obviously absurd. I would lol thinking of someone trying to eat 13 bowls of cereal
That would be 13 cups (unit of measure) of cereal a day, probably 4-6 bowls depending on how generous you are when pouring it into a bowl. Or 13 slices of bread (which is most of a loaf). That doesn't seem at all like a reasonably recommended number. Trying to find real charts, it looks like by 1992 they were recommending a range of 6-11 servings of grains (rice, cereals, pasta, breads). Which is at least a more reasonable number if you swing towards the low end.
Anecdotal, but I have to root for eggs whenever I get the chance. I've eaten at least 3 eggs a day every single day for almost a decade, before which I didn't stick to a number and would often eat 6-8 eggs a day. My doctor recently told my cholesterol was perfect. Maybe I'm an exception or maybe I have the right genes for eggs, no idea. But they're definitely not an automatic health disaster like many people think they are.
When you eat foods with cholesterol, it has little effect on your cholesterol levels because your cells make it by themselves, and the body will only absorb cholesterol if your levels are low. If you have good cholesterol levels, you can eat many eggs and your cholesterol wont go up. High cholesterol is caused from eating too many sugars and starches which causes an insulin spike that tells the cells to make more cholesterol even when they don't need it.
Yes, I think that the problem is, we as a society believe that all science is created equal. Obviously dietary science is lagging way behind, say, particle physics. But we blindly accept everything every field of study has reached a 51% consensus on.
The fact that you mentioned the particle physics field is hilarious, because one of the most influential scientific journalists to start attacking the lipid hypothesis was Gary Taubes. Taubes found the lipid story in the course of investigating the "bad science and fraud" that was present in the string theory community within physics. A physicist he was interviewing told Taubes:
"If you think the string theory science is terrible, just wait until you see human nutritional science." This prompted a deeper conversation, and when Taubes started digging, he was shocked enough by what he found to write what turned out to be the first of several books on the topic.
The 'food pyramid' doesn't come from the FDA, it's a USDA (department of agriculture) construct, and was designed from all appearances, to prop up or increase our intake of grains grown by US farmers.
Yeah the human body is exquisitely designed to maintain a salt balance. Sweat, urine, even tears control excretion of excess. Unless your body is compromised, eat all the salt you want.
Sidenote: I wish I could find good, or even any, low-fat options these days. They all seemed to have been left in the 90's. I had to even quit the seed-filled breads I loved because of my troubled pancreas (non-diabetic). I miss whole eggs so much...
Also sidenote: this is the picture regarding cardiovascular health, but with extremely high-fat foods and diets being the mode right now I'll bet we see a bit of an uptick on chronic pancreatitis cases in time. Moderation, as always, is the best course for most... "everything in moderation, especially moderation"
I lost a significant portion of my pancreas to necrosis and subsequently went into multiple organ failure—all out of the blue. Almost killed me last June/July. I was told, while lacking a concerted diagnosis, that the only reason I survived or didn't end up in the ICU was because I was in good shape and I was young (far too young for what they were seeing).
It wasn't just eggs. It was any dietary fats and alcohol. Eggs just happen to be something I ate most days for breakfast after the gym and suddenly could not keep down, along with most foods, and even water, at the time. Dehydration and kidney failure sucks, no matter what the cool kids tell you. Ended up losing about 50lbs of muscle and body fat in all of a couple of weeks.
They didn't want to risk surgery, partially due to the liquid compressing my lungs needed to subside, and since pancreatic necrotic debridement can be problematic in itself, and there had ended up being multiple deposits of necrotic material and other unidentified inflamed regions throughout my abdomen—so the least invasive option was put forward first: a modified diet and pain medication when I need it.
I might not feel pain immediately, and it's less the pain that I'm worried about—but until I have more imaging done and receive a diagnosis or the old "all-clear" I'm assumed to be at risk for developing chronic problems, or worse. (One does not simply keep on living without a pancreas)
So, I've been on a diet that puts me at below 30g of dietary fats a day total for about seven months now. Of particular concern is overloading the mechanism of pancreatic enzyme production, so that 30g has to be spread throughout the day evenly—can't have concentrated quantities that exists in some foods. It's the saddest diet. Most flavourful foods have a high fat content. Most non-fat options will just throw in some xanthum gum as a thickener and sugar and salt to flavour. It's not the same.
In short: it was the summary opinion of about 8 doctors including several surgeons at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, a hepatobiliary surgical oncologist in at St Joseph Hospital in Toronto, my GP, and several others. Eggs are little dietary fat bombs. I miss eggs, they're one of my favourite foods, and they're so healthy—it's where I used to get most of my B12 (I was already deficient). Egg whites are... fine.
Sorry to hear about your health problems, and sorry if my comment came across as flippant. Sounds like you have a good team looking after you and I hope that "all-clear" comes through soon.
No worries. Just thought I'd answer in detail rather than hand-waving so that anyone who was reading might understand where I was coming from rather than just looking for an argument on the internet :)
It's such a shame nutrition science is in such infancy because when I read these types of things I get excited and then a couple years later there's inevitably some contradicting study.
The only thing I've read that seems to never be contradicted is the following quote:
> Eat food, not too much, mostly plants
EDIT: Is it just me, or do they never say how the eggs are prepared? I feel like that would have a huge effect as well as since the preparation method changes the composition of the eggs of course. Frying eggs with a bunch of butter might negate any health benefits eating say, an otherwise poached egg, might have.
I loved fried eggs and wonder if I'd receive more benefit by boiling or poaching, hmm.
This is what you get when "nutrition" is run by the USDA, whose job it is to grow and sell food. This belongs in HHS so there is no conflict of interests. Most of these "studies" are funded by groups with ulterior motives. And then we have billions in lobbying and subsidies to reconcile. It is such a shame. We know what we should do but remain bullied.
This study is a meta-analysis, so it works off of published research and does no original experiments of its own. By its nature, it incorporates systemic bias of earlier published studies. Often times, this kind of analysis leads to opposing biases being diluted or canceling out, but given widespread industry funding of this topic in particular, I'm not super optimistic about impartiality here.
Not sure why your post is getting downvoted, the evidence for it's accuracy isn't in question that I know of.
Real question: Does anyone think that food industry money doesn't influence policy and recommendations? If so can you provide some sort of supporting evidence for this view?
Not an answer, but another question. Back when eggs were demonized and grains were promoted, was there more lobbying flowing from grain farmers vs. egg farmers? Also including that chickens are fed grains, and therefore every egg sold represents profit to the grain seller?
When it comes to the precise details, I imagine there aren't many people who know for sure how the convoluted machinations of money and policy played out on a particular issue. It's the nature of the game to keep it as opaque as possible.
If we find out, it's usually many years down the road and it's rarely as direct as "grain outbid eggs". There are behemoth consumer food manufacturers involved, pharmaceutical companies too (statin drugs are a cash cow). Lots of industries profit or lose based on public health decisions and perceptions.
Research has said eggs are good for the last 20 years.
It was believed they were bad due to their high cholesterol and cholesterol was considered bad across the board. But modern research shows it's more complicated than that.
> Research has said eggs are good for the last 20 years.
McGill published a study in 2012 [1] which shows egg yolk consumption is connected in an exponential relationship with carotid plaque area (see: pg 3):
> ... both tobacco smoking and egg yolk consumption accelerate atherosclerosis, in a similar fashion: the increase in plaque area is linear with age, but it is exponential with smoking history and egg consumption. Curve fitting with the cases that had non-zero values for egg yolks and smoking showed that an exponential fit was better than a linear fit.
I personally think eggs are good for you and eat at least one a day, but there have been studies that have shown results that might lead you to believe otherwise like the following:
". In addition, consumption of ≥7 eggs/wk was associated with a modestly but significantly greater risk of total mortality in this population. In contrast, egg consumption was associated with a greater risk of all-cause mortality in a dose-response fashion among physicians with diabetes (2 times the risk of death in people consuming ≥7 eggs/wk than in those consuming <1 egg/wk). Furthermore, our data provided suggestive evidence for a greater risk of MI and stroke with egg consumption among male physicians with diabetes. In contrast, baseline hypercholesterolemia status did not influence the relation between egg consumption and CVD or mortality."
The same study admits that the finding was not conclusive though and that there have been other studies that have contradicted their results.
I completely agree - that's exactly my point. A lot of these studies are not done with the necessary level of rigor needed to draw a definitive conclusion. So we're left with a bunch of half baked "contradictory" studies in many cases.
How exactly would you conduct a nutrition study to the "necessary level of rigor needed to draw a definitive conclusion?" The most interesting studies are the ones that follow people long term, and you can't exactly force people to eat according to a specific diet for a period of years.
The one thing that is hard to control for in the studies is if people who crave eggs (and therefore consume more of them) also crave other things that are bad for them. Or if the genetic makeup can cause an increased craving for specific food types (for example genetics influences whether cilantro enhances food or tastes like dish soap).
I remember my father (a scientist himself) stop eating eggs about ~25 years ago because of the "science" and at a later time resuming eating eggs because of that other "science".
It’s sad how far behind health science is. Why don’t we have devices constantly monitoring us for health problems? Why can’t I easily browse through the data that doctors have on me, and transfer it between doctors? Why do I have to prep and cook and measure to get the optimum amount of nutrients for my body, why isn’t there a product that offers that for me? These things should be a higher priority as a society than social media apps or video games.
I don’t think the problem is that nutrition science is in its infancy, it’s more that modern science incentivizes pumping out flashy results cheaply, and as fast as possible.
Nutrition research is incredibly difficult to conduct, too. It often relies on participant reporting and is immensely complicated in terms of identifying and weeding out potential confounders. With how little we know about things that could play significant roles (e.g. gut microbiome), doing good science on this is super difficult.
Which is kinda a half measure too. My body has been responding amazingly to a vegetarian diet (w/vegan flex days) and anywhere between 16-20 hours of fasting a day. I combat the horrors of factory farming and what's done to these poor animals and gain all the incredible benefits of fasting, all the while still enjoying a normal lifestyle of 2 tasty meals a day. Meat seems like this weird socially acceptable yet dangerous extravagance, a bit like smoking, to me. I'm working my way to cutting out eggs and am glad to be doing so considering all the negative outcomes other studies have revealed about egg consumption.
If you look at all the studies uncritically and average out their findings, then the safe amount of eggs, imho, per week is between zero and two.
The study of the health outcomes of egg consumption, in general, is a bit out there. A 2009 study claimed the opposite, that 7+ eggs a week increased the odds of cardiovascular disease. There's a strong anti-vegetarian pop-culture under-current right now fueled by the alt-right, keto types, and 'masculinity' experts so small single studies like these will get a lot of attention, but I'd wait for someone to try to replicate it, or at least see it as one data point in hundreds of reputable egg studies that mostly seem to contradict themselves. The egg industry is a $10bn industry and politically very well connected. Some of these studies may be influenced by that. Evolution didn't seem to design us to regularly eat the eggs of other animals and we seem poorly adapted to do so.
Fun/depressing fact: There's one caged egg laying hen for every American.
"There's a strong anti-vegetarian pop-culture under-current right now fueled by the alt-right," the alt right gets a lot of weird generic boogeyman associations but this is the weirdest I've ever seen lol
I'm going to try to articulate the arguments of the "veggie" doctors.
1) Industry funding colors scientific results. I believe people on HN understand this.
2) There are marketing agencies in the US which exist to market the products of animal agriculture. These agencies fund a significant amount of research into their products.
3) The human body has an upper limit on the amount of dietary cholesterol it can absorb daily. Two eggs will accomplish this for most people.
4) Given (3), it is relatively simple to design a scientific study which demonstrates that consuming n+1 eggs daily is no more harmful than consuming n eggs daily.
Please see the video series by Dr Greger[1] and the old newsletter by Dr McDougall[2].
On a personal note, I followed the veggie doctors advice for a number of years, by eating a strict vegetarian diet nearly free of sugar. My body weight dropped by more than 100 pounds, to a healthy (not overweight) range. My cholesterol dropped to around 92. After a few years, I was persistently, ravenously, insatiably hungry. The only thing that helped was returning to consuming animal products. Without intending to devolve into the middle-of-the-road fallacy, you may wish to heed the advice of Harvard Medical[3].
The problem I have been struggling with is that I just don't like most meat products. I think overall I have mentally since I was a child slowly create more and more disdain for meat eating and that has resulted in a physical negative reaction when I taste meat. Even just seeing meat especially in the raw form grosses me out now.
Unfortunately I have found being mostly vegetarian actually hasn't greatly helped with my weight as I find there are still many fatty options that don't involve meats.
I would be happy with how I eat, if it weren't for the fact that it can be hard to get certain things like high proteins from veggies. It's hard to match the efficiencies from a quick chicken and rice meal as an example.
And my cholesterol dropped by 90+ points by losing 40 lbs and adopting a chicken, egg, rice, green vegetable, nuts, cheese, whole milk, and fruit centric diet. Most of those foods were better with regard to satiating me and led to me consuming fewer calories overall.
Weight loss is a significant contributor to improving cholesterol levels in cases of non-hereditary high cholesterol. When moving from obese to normal weight (in your case) or borderline obese/very overweight to normal weight (in my case) it's hard to separate that from the impact of the diet on cholesterol levels.
This systematic review and meta-analysis concludes:
> Our analysis suggests that higher consumption of eggs (more than 1 egg/day) was not associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease, but was associated with a significant reduction in risk of coronary artery disease.
That statement is technically correct. And while being technically correct is great for the fictional bureaucrats on Futurama (I really miss that show), it can also lead to click-bait headlines.
Most people will read a headline that says "The association between..." to mean that there is an association (because that is how it is typically used).
It is a common trope that eggs are bad for cardiovascular health because they're high in cholesterol, despite this being shown to be false a number of times over.
A good question is thus how to turn around an urban myth once it's already become commonplace?
It's been known for a long time that consumption of cholesterol doesn't directly raise blood cholesterol. The dangers of high cholesterol were first raised to the public consciousness in the 90s which is around when the "eggs may be bad for you" hit it's peak. It wasn't until years later that the causes of high cholesterol were better understood and the advice was refined. That's around the time that trans fat became the real villain and that advice has mostly stood up to scrutiny for a while now.
Maybe explain to people what Cholesterol is, it delivers essential materials to cells. That's the hypothesis for why you find high cholesterol in the blood of those with heart or coronary disease, those cells are damaged and need resupply.
...prepared with zero oil or butter on a ceramic non-stick pan.
My cholesterol levels are great. My wife eats the same diet (except she doesn't order dinner at work like I do) and her cholesterol levels are ridiculously good.
These results conform to my bias, but seem to be based on the same flawed epidemiological data, based largely on seriously flawed NHANES Food Frequency Questionnaires, without the power to make causal associations. If I discount these studies when they tell me eggs will harden my arteries I should do the same when they tell me they don't, which I happen to agree with.
Hey look, another dietary study. It also fits my own preconceptions about safety of animal protein and fats.
This is a little better quality than the usual junk we see for these articles. But still, it's mostly just data juggling from a public database. They have done a little to try and avoid cherry picking and established a process with third party investigators which is nice.
Personally I would rate this as "Worth further study." Interesting, but definitely not a firm conclusion.
> Two investigators independently reviewed data. Conflicts were resolved through consensus
They're literally telling you that they cherry-picked existing research for whatever serves their narrative.
Occam's razor applies here. They're trying to convince you that consuming cholesterol and saturated fat is not going to clog your arteries. If eggs won't, please tell me what will.
Eggs taste good, and they're in literally everything. Be careful when people tell you what you want to hear.
Conclusions: Our analysis suggests that higher consumption of eggs (more than 1 egg/day) was not associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease, but was associated with a significant reduction in risk of coronary artery disease.
That's really interesting! I just had a heart attack a few months ago and eggs have been on my "very rarely" list, I'm glad to see I probably can move those up to "probably fine a few times a week" list.
One really important thing to understand when you see these sorts of studies is that they are done in aggregate while every human being is different. There are people who can eat eggs and pork and smoke cigars and never suffer consequences, and there are some who are far less tolerant. If you're in a high-risk group because you've already suffered damage, you need to be very risk averse.
I think your advice comes from a good place, but it really depends on the doctor.
I’ve worked closely with bunch of primary care doctors and would only trust 1 in about 10 of them to give good nutrition advice. My work involved careful review of their clinical treatment of patients in a primary care settings.
My anecdotal experience with cardiologists is no better.
The overall issue is that they have grown tired of really challenging patients to change much of their diets. Even if the diet is what is really killing them. And I don’t blame them, but I also think that many doctors don’t see nutrition as part of their job.
Fair question, and I guess the answer is both. He didn't provide any advice that seemed bad, he didn't say avoid eggs, he didn't say have bacon with every meal. But I've also been reading everything I can to make sure I'm not missing anything.
Amazing how alive this cholesterol myth still is. Anecdotally from my own experience talking to people, the fear of cholesterol and saturated fats is most present still in the US and UK, two of the countries with the worst rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. When I studied clinical psychology a few years ago, we had a ’health psychology’ course with an American standard textbook on nutrition. Cholesterol was mentioned literally once in the book, only in the context of how ’bad’ it was. Nowhere did the authors think to discuss why we produce it at all, and what actual functions it has in the body. The idea that dietary cholesterol will just randomly ’clog up’ your arteries was ridiculous from the get-go. The most sensible and well researched hypothesis about heart disease and the role of cholesterol I’ve come across so far is laid out in a long series of blog posts on scottish doctor Malcolm McKendrick’s homepage. The very short an incomplete gist: stress and associated episodes of increased blood pressure, together with the oxidizing effects of elevated blood sugar caused by high glycemic load diet causes damage to blood vessels. Cholesterol is part of the immune response to this damage and acts as a band-aid on the damaged area so it can heal.
What if we took a step back and realized that our bodies are all different and all of these studies likely never have 100% proper control over external variables. Perhaps eating 7 eggs a week is good for you if you also eat A, do B, etc, but otherwise it’s bad... too many variables and still (what feels like) a near infinite amount of knowledge lacking of our own bodies.
The wildy differing research results indicates to me that the science of diet and health is just really hard. You can’t easily create control groups for longer running studies. You can’t easily control for (epi)genetic factors. There’s a tonne of other variables you also need to rule out.
And for individuals it’s still unclear whether the results apply to them or not.
Personally I’ve decided to go middle of the road, listen to my body and factor in more obvious things into my decisions about food, like animal cruelty, antibiotic resistance because of mass livestock keeping and consequences to the environment.
They looked at 70,000 expectant swedish mothers who got the flu vaccine and couldn't find a relationship with incidence of autism. Would you ask us to be skeptical over the results of that study because all of these women's bodies are different, the infinite variables, and the fact that we don't have perfect information about human bodies?
I would like to see more than the summary. Is there a way to get access?
I’m interested because I was on a low-carb high-fat diet where I ate 3 eggs a day – that was until I got a blood test that showed very high cholesterol. Now I’ve cut dietary cholesterol and I’m on statins. It’s much harder to maintain weight loss this way.
The journal publishers are always getting Sci-hub's internet access cut off, so you have to search for where they are served from at any moment. Every time they are cut off, they find another way back on, and you have to find them again.
The journal publishers are about as evil as any corporation not actively killing people can be. They take huge "page fees" from scientists to publish papers, huge subscriptions from academic libraries, and don't pay their editors or their reviewers. Their profit margin is 40% and rising.
Probably nothing can be done about them without legislation.
* * *
On your other remarks: Dietary cholesterol has absolutely nothing to do with heart disease. Your liver makes the cholesterol your body needs. No one has ever been able to demonstrate any benefit to statins for people who have not had a heart attack, despite trying really hard for 30+ years.
But statins interfere with your liver producing the cholesterol your body needs. Statins have bad side effects that they don't like to talk about, particularly muscle damage.
The best things you could do is eliminate sugar, and increase exercise. Saturated fat is good for you, and helps reduce appetite. Sugar and gluten are appetite stimulants.
You may be a lean mass hyperresponder - check out Dave Feldman's work on the topic at https://cholesterolcode.com/. Doctors can be pretty jumpy about cholesterol numbers and I'd hate to see you take advice which may be good for the general population but bad for you at face value.
I remember Beyond Egg brand mayonnaise pushing their product as a healthier cholesterol free alternative. In trying to track down those claims just now, I learned that the FDA cracked down on them because mayonnaise is required to contain egg, and that the egg council went after them and ran afoul of the USDA. It really makes me think about who funds these studies and why.
We have 6 chickens cranking out 5-6 eggs a day so this is a huge relief. Eggs are a significant portion of my daily protein. Since our chickens free range and eat plenty of greens they are pretty high in Omega 3 fatty acids.
I've known that the old school idea that cholesterol in eggs made them unhealthy was mostly bunk, but good to hear it confirmed.
Now I just need to figure out a way to find a good source of nitrate free bacon.
Why was this study titled in a way that would lead a person to presuming the opposite of what the conclusion actually is?
I get that technically the title does not actually imply there is an “association”, but why not name it something that doesn’t lead the mind as much in the wrong direction? For example: “Effects of Egg Consumption on the Risk of Cardiovascular Diseases”
Woody Alan said in a movie "Think about it! All the things our grandparents said were good for us, are bad for us. Sunshine, red meat, college - all the things they said are good for us, are bad for us!"
This sounds too optimistic and almost 180 degrees opposite of what we've heard from health authorities until today. Can anyone who's an expert on the subject chime in, what's the catch?
There is one documented evidence of a man eating about 15 eggs (or some huge number) for about 25 years, and was in good health. Some search online should reveal the literature.
Almost everyone who dies has eaten food in the last 7 days. The association between eating food and death is very high. I'd avoid it all together if I were you!
They told us for five decades that saturated fat was bad for us.
Lately it turns out that saturated fat is absolutely fine, always was. Eggs, too, apparently.
It has been the sugar, nitrites, margarine and Crisco in everything killing us. The trouble with Crisco was known with certainty in 1957, and it took Fred Kummerow until 2017 to get it mostly out of the US diet. Some companies still get exceptional treatment allowing them to continue putting in poison, apparently because it would cost them money to stop putting in poison just yet. They have poison in the pipeline they would need to throw away that they would prefer to sell.
But, there is still something in American beef that causes trouble; just, not the fat. FDA spent the last five decades not investigating why beef is killing people, just out and out assuming it had to be the fat. for no reason at all. Now, we have to start from scratch and find out what is the real cause.
Meanwhile, glucose is absolutely fine, too.
Glucose is what is in corn before they use an enzyme to turn half of it into fructose, which is poison in the amounts Americans eat. They do it because fructose tastes sweeter when it's cold. It's hard to buy glucose; you won't find bags of it at the grocery store, even to put in your coffee where it would be hot and plenty sweet anyway. You pretty much only find it in Karo corn syrup, which is itself getting hard to find.
Remember that name, Fred Kummerow. He is personally responsible for kids born in this millennium not dying from heart disease caused by poison siphoned into stuff sold labeled as food. The corporations, their pet politicians, and the FDA fought him every step of the way. FDA finally was forced to declare trans fats poison in 2009, and then he had to sue them to make them issue regulations forbidding its use, which they didn't issue until 2014; and then they gave industry 3 more years to flush the poison out of their pipelines and onto Americans' arteries.
If you can keep the fructose out of kids, they might not die from type-2 diabetes and metabolic disorder so much.
When I was a kid, for a few years, I had a stepmom who was relatively high educated, and was very quick to pivot to the healthy diet of the 90s: grains for breakfast, pasta for dinner. When I would spend the night out, and come home and talk about how much I loved the breakfast at my friend's house (eggs and bacon) she would call them "ignorant rednecks" and talk about how "some people are just too dumb to listen to science or doctors."
My "redneck" friends has a much healthier diet than I did. We know this now. Yet people still blindly trust the US public health authorities. I'm not a moron, so I don't inherently mistrust their statements either. I just think a healthy skepticism is warranted with US public health messaging and the science that they fund. Entire careers in academia were flushed down the toilet because a brave few tried to point out how incredibly flawed the "dietary cholesterol causes heart disease" narrative.
Think about this: the leading scientists and the scientific community in the 1990s strongly believed that both eggs and avocados strongly increased the risk of heart disease. Avocados. Bad for your health.......... Looking at our collective love of avocados today, it should be a highly publicized rebuke of how awful the FDA's food pyramid campaign was.