Most of us at Smith Mountain Lake have heard that eggs are bad for your health. Or at least that egg yolks are full of bad cholesterol. Some in my family have always maintained that this was not a proven fact and that eggs are good for you, particularly if they are organically grown and fertile. It looks as if they have been vindicated in this opinion.
According to a Harvard Medical study on eggs, this popular breakfast food is not bad after all. Other studies show some positive benefits of eggs such as the presence of carotenoids, and Vit. d, choline, etc. as well as an absence of other studies to prove that they are harmful to your health.
The only way that eggs have been shown to have detrimental effects is “scrambled” or cooked/fried in some nasty kind of oil such as lard or other hydrogenated/saturated/refined fats.
Below you will find the essence of the Harvard study and you can go to PubMed to see even more info. if you so desire. In the meantime, buy some organic eggs and poach, boil, or fry while keeping a soft yolk…and enjoy!
Dietary cholesterol and the risk of cardiovascular disease in patients: a review of the Harvard Egg Study and other data.
Nutrition and Functional Foods, Richardson Centre for Functional Foods and Nutraceuticals, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada. peter_jones@umanitoba.ca
For many years, both the medical community and the general public have incorrectly associated eggs with high serum cholesterol and being deleterious to health, even though cholesterol is an essential component of cells and organisms. It is now acknowledged that the original studies purporting to show a linear relationship between cholesterol intake and coronary heart disease (CHD) may have contained fundamental study design flaws, including conflated cholesterol and saturated fat consumption rates and inaccurately assessed actual dietary intake of fats by study subjects. Newer and more accurate trials, such as that conducted by Frank B. Hu of the Harvard School of Public Health (1999), have shown that consumption of up to seven eggs per week is harmonious with a healthful diet, except in male patients with diabetes for whom an association in higher egg intake and CHD was shown. The degree to which serum cholesterol is increased by dietary cholesterol depends upon whether the individual’s cholesterol synthesis is stimulated or down-regulated by such increased intake, and the extent to which each of these phenomena occurs varies from person to person. Several recent studies have shed additional light on the specific interplay between dietary cholesterol and cardiovascular health risk. It is evident that the dynamics of cholesterol homeostasis, and the development of CHD, are extremely complex and multifactorial. In summary, the earlier purported adverse relationship between dietary cholesterol and heart disease risk was likely largely exaggerated.