Reevaluating eggs’ cholesterol risks
Interesting report (from 2008) in Science News about the cholesterol risk posed by eggs in one’s diet. Full disclosure: I have an egg each morning for breakfast (long with hot cereal), and occasionally an egg or two in a salad or the like. I based this dietary choice on a whole cluster of findings over the past five or 10 years. As the article notes, however, some people respond more strongly to dietary cholesterol than others. My own cholesterol levels seems in good control, but YMMV.
As noted in the article, this particular study was funded by the American Egg Council, but:
The new study’s findings do dovetail with large studies by other groups having no industrial financing. For instance, in 1999, Frank B. Hu of the Harvard School of Public Health and his colleagues reported no increased risk of coronary heart disease or stroke in men or women who ate more than one egg per day. The analysis compared diet and cardiovascular risk among nearly 38,000 participants of two long-running epidemiologic studies.
A Michigan State University analysis, reported a year later, analyzed the diets and blood-cholesterol data for more than 27,000 people—a representative cross-section of the U.S. population. It found that cholesterol was lower in people who ate more than four eggs per week than among people who eschewed eggs. However, the researchers cautioned, “this study should not be used as a basis for recommending higher egg consumption for regulation of serum cholesterol.”
When I sent this article with a friend, he said that, contrary to the statement in the article, the American Egg Council also funded the two larger studies referenced. In fact, he said, the American Egg Council is behind any study that finds eating eggs in moderate amounts is benign. I do not know how he learned this, but in the interest of full disclosure I include his statement.
For me, the study’s details, as described in the article at the link, make sense. YMMV.
