Eggs: The Hard Facts :

Brothers and sisters, I am here to speak out against the treatment of a certain group that for years has been broken, beaten and battered on a daily basis. There have been lies spread, assumptions made and names called. It’s time that eggs got the respect and attention they deserve.

With names like eggs Benedict (a name synonymous with a treasonous turncoat) and even more blatant anti-egg sentiments like “deviled” eggs, it’s easy to see that there’s a substantial amount of egg defamation occurring in this country.

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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.)

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