6 ms·

Associations of Egg Consumption with Cardiovascular Disease and Mortality

15 points by mathoff 8y ago

SubiculumCode 8y ago
But I like eggs damnit. Edit 1. My comment was made on a submission, which I did not think would gain much notice. Oops. Low quality comment to the fore! Edit 2. Really though, I eat a couple of eggs a day. I should scale it back anyway, as a hedge, and eat non-traditional (In USA) breakfasts, like rice and beans.
- getalyft 8y ago
  and you can pry the bacon out of my cold dead hands!
  - Pfhreak 8y ago
    I used to be that way. 100% hardcore gimme that delicious bacon. An article by Glenn Greenwald (of interviewing Snowden fame) on Ag Gag laws [1] made me realize that, at least in the US, eating bacon meant I was supporting some real fucked up shit. I'm not opposed to meat, I just bought a whole beef, but I definitely took a hard look at where my meat was coming from. [1] https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missing-piglets-animal-rights-glenn-greenwald/ https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...
    - ianlevesque 8y ago
      Also getting an (un)healthy dose of Ractopamine with that bacon if you’re in the US.
    - copperx 8y ago
      Not to mention bacon is a recognized type 1 carcinogen.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- CamperBob2 8y ago
  How many times have they flip-flopped back and forth on eggs alone? It's easy to get the impression that the people running these studies are either biased or simply don't know what they're doing.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    I agree. Eat what you want. Don't overdo any one thing. Prefer natural to processed food. Watch your weight. Enjoy life and don't worry so much.
  - mywittyname 8y ago
    Beyond the prevalent bias, nutritional science is just hard. I doubt we'll ever really get a handle on it. It isn't ethical to lock people up and feed them a steady diet of something we might thing is going to cause them to develop some disease. So we have to rely on mostly self-reported data collected over extended periods of time. That being said, I think the first pushback against eggs had to do with their high amounts of cholesterol. It was original assumed that dietary cholesterol intake was related to blood cholesterol levels. Which is something we now know to be false. However, eggs are very high in saturated fats. The American Heart Associate still recommends that these be limited (from all sources) because there is a good deal of evidence that saturated fat intake contributes to elevated LDL cholesterol. I generally trust AHA recommendations, but they are not free from bias, as they have food companies as "corporate supporters."
- cuspycode 8y ago
  A famous anecdote for all egg-lovers: Albert Hofmann (inventor of LSD) claimed that he owed his health to eating two raw eggs for breakfast everyday. He lived to the impressive age of 102.
dvh 8y ago
Eggs. Every decade 180° turn. If you don't like this paper just wait.
- vbuwivbiu 8y ago
  180° is no exaggeration!
nightski 8y ago
Oh great, another one of those bs self reporting nutritional studies over super long periods of time. 17.5 years and they only followed up once from what I can tell. Can you accurately report what you ate over the last 17.5 years? Even over the past week can be difficult as I realized when I started tracking my food in MyFitnessPal. Unless consistently tracking, it's pretty easy to be very far off from what you actually eat. That's assuming people are even trying to be accurate. Many look on the past with rose tinted glasses and forget about indulgences and snacks. These studies are plague on the industry and need to go away.
- n8henrie 8y ago
  Are you suggesting that they didn't actually eat more eggs / cholesterol, but some other factor that makes people statistically significantly more likely to have CVD and die also makes people more likely to falsely report egg / cholesterol consumption?
  - kazinator 8y ago
    An obvious factor to look at among the subjects would be body fat level. Maybe many of those who consumed more eggs or cholesterol simply just ate more. If the study simply tracked calories, maybe calories would be found to be correlated with CVD risk. Problem with that, you can't really track what some people eat for 30 years.
    - importantbrian 8y ago
      100% this. They don't control for lean mass or anything like that, so it's hard to say if it's the cholesterol or simply overeating that is the problem. I want to see a study where Calories and Macros are held the same but one group eats more cholesterol than the other and see what those results look like. Sadly those kinds of studies are very hard to do in the nutritional space.
  - importantbrian 8y ago
    This study has lots of problems. I'm not totally convinced the results are statistically significant. The problem with using non-linear models and not showing P values is it is open to interpretation what a statistically significant result is. To me, these results don't seem that compelling. For the cholesterol question, the Adjusted Risk for CVD at the 95% confidence level is between 1.39% and 5.09%, and for All-Cause Mortality, it is 2.51%-6.36%. That means according to this study cholesterol consumption is more highly correlated with all-cause mortality than it is with CVD. That seems hard to believe, but might be true. The biggest issue I have is with using non-linear models. I don't have access to the full article so I don't know why they chose the statistical methods they did, but I'm suspicious that they don't report P values for what it seems should be linear relationships. I don't buy the non-linearity argument in the summary. Once you get into non-linear regression models the risk of overfitting gets worse. There is a lot of work that has to be done to show you've accounted for this, and it's hard to tell from the summary if that was done. They also didn't control for some things I would have liked to see. Namely, calories and weight gain. So, it could be that all this study is really showing is a relationship between overeating, weight gain, and CVD and all-cause mortality. It may simply be that people who eat more calories and end up being overweight are also more likely to eat a lot of eggs and cholesterol. In this case, it's gaining weight that causes health issues, not the eggs. It's just the case that people who eat too much and are overweight also happen to eat a lot of eggs. What I'd like to see is a study where they control for calories consumed, weight gain, lean mass etc. and then see how a diet with more cholesterol performed against a diet with less cholesterol.
kennu 8y ago
I wonder who funded this research? Did it also account for frequent egg-eaters tendencies to maintain a particular kind of diet regarding other foods, and other similar associations?
- SubiculumCode 8y ago
  Right? Sausage and bacon seem likely culprits.
theprotocol 8y ago
Amid the neverending diet controversy it seems safest to do low carb (non-keto), medium high-quality fat of which a majority is monounsaturated, medium protein - and be aware not to reduce saturated fat too much as it's not that scary after all, but also don't go overboard like some of the somewhat extreme saturated fat advocates that have appeared in the last few years.
- SubiculumCode 8y ago
  Someday I'd like to see a cost-benefit analysis of eating salads in place of something like bacon and eggs. It seems to me that the uptick in cardiovascular health would be swallowed up by the increased risk of food poisoning.
  - JoelMcCracken 8y ago
    And for me, salads are horrid and ALWAYS make me sick. I only eat vegetables very well cooked, or not at all.
- uhtred 8y ago
  Why low carb?
  - crushcrashcrush 8y ago
    Carbs = Sugar. Period, end of story. The key to good body composition is a high protein, low carb (low sugar) diet. Avoid foods that spike insulin. Anything else is hogwash, because calories are not calories.
    - uhtred 8y ago
      How do you get fibre then?
      - JoelMcCracken 8y ago
        a large number of vegetables are low carb.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
"Associations of Dietary Cholesterol or Egg Consumption" Yes, eggs are good way to ingest cholesterol, but in the classic American diet, they are certainly not the only way. It feels suspect for them to pull eggs, and only eggs, into the spotlight.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
eternalny1 8y ago
Choline is an extremely important element for health. Recent studies have shown that it has a dramatic positive effect on fatty liver disease, other ailments. Egg yolk is a major source of choline. Fatty liver disease has seen a dramatic increase since people have removed eggs from their diets. This study is questionable as other commenters have mentioned. I'm not buying the "eggs are bad" sentiment again.
ycombonator 8y ago
Totally commonsensical theory. Just have eggs and coffee together. The effects negate each other and while you are at it toss some garlic and olive oil in the egg scramble. No need to thank me.
- taborj 8y ago
  So, wait...the theory, then is to have...breakfast? Sign me up.
ykevinator 8y ago
I wonder if statins remove the additional risk.
kazinator 8y ago
Eggs are often consumed with a heaping order of carbohydrates. Are we talking eggs here? Or Egg McMuffins with side orders of hash browns, drizzled with ketchup?
skookum 8y ago
Here's another study reaching the opposite conclusion: https://heart.bmj.com/content/104/21/1756 https://heart.bmj.com/content/104/21/1756 The key difference is "Among US adults..." versus "Among Chinese adults..." Hmmm, maybe it's not the eggs?
stillbourne 8y ago
I call bullshit. Classic case of correlation != causation.

15 points by mathoff 8y ago

But I like eggs damnit. Edit 1. My comment was made on a submission, which I did not think would gain much notice. Oops. Low quality comment to the fore! Edit 2. Really though, I eat a couple of eggs a day. I should scale it back anyway, as a hedge, and eat non-traditional (In USA) breakfasts, like rice and beans.

getalyft 8y ago
and you can pry the bacon out of my cold dead hands!
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  I used to be that way. 100% hardcore gimme that delicious bacon. An article by Glenn Greenwald (of interviewing Snowden fame) on Ag Gag laws [1] made me realize that, at least in the US, eating bacon meant I was supporting some real fucked up shit. I'm not opposed to meat, I just bought a whole beef, but I definitely took a hard look at where my meat was coming from. [1] https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missing-piglets-animal-rights-glenn-greenwald/ https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...
  - ianlevesque 8y ago
    Also getting an (un)healthy dose of Ractopamine with that bacon if you’re in the US.
  - copperx 8y ago
    Not to mention bacon is a recognized type 1 carcinogen.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
CamperBob2 8y ago
How many times have they flip-flopped back and forth on eggs alone? It's easy to get the impression that the people running these studies are either biased or simply don't know what they're doing.
- ams6110 8y ago
  I agree. Eat what you want. Don't overdo any one thing. Prefer natural to processed food. Watch your weight. Enjoy life and don't worry so much.
- mywittyname 8y ago
  Beyond the prevalent bias, nutritional science is just hard. I doubt we'll ever really get a handle on it. It isn't ethical to lock people up and feed them a steady diet of something we might thing is going to cause them to develop some disease. So we have to rely on mostly self-reported data collected over extended periods of time. That being said, I think the first pushback against eggs had to do with their high amounts of cholesterol. It was original assumed that dietary cholesterol intake was related to blood cholesterol levels. Which is something we now know to be false. However, eggs are very high in saturated fats. The American Heart Associate still recommends that these be limited (from all sources) because there is a good deal of evidence that saturated fat intake contributes to elevated LDL cholesterol. I generally trust AHA recommendations, but they are not free from bias, as they have food companies as "corporate supporters."
cuspycode 8y ago
A famous anecdote for all egg-lovers: Albert Hofmann (inventor of LSD) claimed that he owed his health to eating two raw eggs for breakfast everyday. He lived to the impressive age of 102.

dvh 8y ago

Eggs. Every decade 180° turn. If you don't like this paper just wait.

vbuwivbiu 8y ago
180° is no exaggeration!

nightski 8y ago

Oh great, another one of those bs self reporting nutritional studies over super long periods of time. 17.5 years and they only followed up once from what I can tell. Can you accurately report what you ate over the last 17.5 years? Even over the past week can be difficult as I realized when I started tracking my food in MyFitnessPal. Unless consistently tracking, it's pretty easy to be very far off from what you actually eat. That's assuming people are even trying to be accurate. Many look on the past with rose tinted glasses and forget about indulgences and snacks. These studies are plague on the industry and need to go away.

n8henrie 8y ago
Are you suggesting that they didn't actually eat more eggs / cholesterol, but some other factor that makes people statistically significantly more likely to have CVD and die also makes people more likely to falsely report egg / cholesterol consumption?
- kazinator 8y ago
  An obvious factor to look at among the subjects would be body fat level. Maybe many of those who consumed more eggs or cholesterol simply just ate more. If the study simply tracked calories, maybe calories would be found to be correlated with CVD risk. Problem with that, you can't really track what some people eat for 30 years.
  - importantbrian 8y ago
    100% this. They don't control for lean mass or anything like that, so it's hard to say if it's the cholesterol or simply overeating that is the problem. I want to see a study where Calories and Macros are held the same but one group eats more cholesterol than the other and see what those results look like. Sadly those kinds of studies are very hard to do in the nutritional space.
- importantbrian 8y ago
  This study has lots of problems. I'm not totally convinced the results are statistically significant. The problem with using non-linear models and not showing P values is it is open to interpretation what a statistically significant result is. To me, these results don't seem that compelling. For the cholesterol question, the Adjusted Risk for CVD at the 95% confidence level is between 1.39% and 5.09%, and for All-Cause Mortality, it is 2.51%-6.36%. That means according to this study cholesterol consumption is more highly correlated with all-cause mortality than it is with CVD. That seems hard to believe, but might be true. The biggest issue I have is with using non-linear models. I don't have access to the full article so I don't know why they chose the statistical methods they did, but I'm suspicious that they don't report P values for what it seems should be linear relationships. I don't buy the non-linearity argument in the summary. Once you get into non-linear regression models the risk of overfitting gets worse. There is a lot of work that has to be done to show you've accounted for this, and it's hard to tell from the summary if that was done. They also didn't control for some things I would have liked to see. Namely, calories and weight gain. So, it could be that all this study is really showing is a relationship between overeating, weight gain, and CVD and all-cause mortality. It may simply be that people who eat more calories and end up being overweight are also more likely to eat a lot of eggs and cholesterol. In this case, it's gaining weight that causes health issues, not the eggs. It's just the case that people who eat too much and are overweight also happen to eat a lot of eggs. What I'd like to see is a study where they control for calories consumed, weight gain, lean mass etc. and then see how a diet with more cholesterol performed against a diet with less cholesterol.

kennu 8y ago

I wonder who funded this research? Did it also account for frequent egg-eaters tendencies to maintain a particular kind of diet regarding other foods, and other similar associations?

SubiculumCode 8y ago
Right? Sausage and bacon seem likely culprits.

theprotocol 8y ago

Amid the neverending diet controversy it seems safest to do low carb (non-keto), medium high-quality fat of which a majority is monounsaturated, medium protein - and be aware not to reduce saturated fat too much as it's not that scary after all, but also don't go overboard like some of the somewhat extreme saturated fat advocates that have appeared in the last few years.

SubiculumCode 8y ago
Someday I'd like to see a cost-benefit analysis of eating salads in place of something like bacon and eggs. It seems to me that the uptick in cardiovascular health would be swallowed up by the increased risk of food poisoning.
- JoelMcCracken 8y ago
  And for me, salads are horrid and ALWAYS make me sick. I only eat vegetables very well cooked, or not at all.
uhtred 8y ago
Why low carb?
- crushcrashcrush 8y ago
  Carbs = Sugar. Period, end of story. The key to good body composition is a high protein, low carb (low sugar) diet. Avoid foods that spike insulin. Anything else is hogwash, because calories are not calories.
  - uhtred 8y ago
    How do you get fibre then?
    - JoelMcCracken 8y ago
      a large number of vegetables are low carb.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

"Associations of Dietary Cholesterol or Egg Consumption" Yes, eggs are good way to ingest cholesterol, but in the classic American diet, they are certainly not the only way. It feels suspect for them to pull eggs, and only eggs, into the spotlight.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

eternalny1 8y ago

Choline is an extremely important element for health. Recent studies have shown that it has a dramatic positive effect on fatty liver disease, other ailments. Egg yolk is a major source of choline. Fatty liver disease has seen a dramatic increase since people have removed eggs from their diets. This study is questionable as other commenters have mentioned. I'm not buying the "eggs are bad" sentiment again.

ycombonator 8y ago

Totally commonsensical theory. Just have eggs and coffee together. The effects negate each other and while you are at it toss some garlic and olive oil in the egg scramble. No need to thank me.

taborj 8y ago
So, wait...the theory, then is to have...breakfast? Sign me up.

ykevinator 8y ago

I wonder if statins remove the additional risk.

kazinator 8y ago

Eggs are often consumed with a heaping order of carbohydrates. Are we talking eggs here? Or Egg McMuffins with side orders of hash browns, drizzled with ketchup?

skookum 8y ago

Here's another study reaching the opposite conclusion: https://heart.bmj.com/content/104/21/1756 https://heart.bmj.com/content/104/21/1756 The key difference is "Among US adults..." versus "Among Chinese adults..." Hmmm, maybe it's not the eggs?

stillbourne 8y ago

I call bullshit. Classic case of correlation != causation.