8 ms·

Association between egg consumption and risk of cardiovascular outcomes

98 points by undefined1 6y ago

blakesterz 6y ago
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.
- the-pigeon 6y ago
  Is your dietary restriction list from a doctor or internet research? I would definitely consult with your doctor and not apply general study conclusions to your own diet considering you had a heart attack recently.
  - monadic3 6y ago
    Better hope your doctor is reading the right stuff.
  - ballenf 6y ago
    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.
  - blakesterz 6y ago
    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.
- tootie 6y ago
  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.
sradman 6y ago
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.
- cs702 6y ago
  That's right, no association was found. Perhaps the title should be changed to "No Association Between Egg Consumption and Risk of Cardiovascular Disease."
  - giarc 6y ago
    The association is that there is no association. So it's an accurate title.
    - derekp7 6y ago
      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).
      - kubanczyk 6y ago
        A number of studies show a direct association. As of now, the number is zero.
      - giarc 6y ago
        How would you propose they change it? They found no association between eggs and CVD and found association between eggs and CAD. "Association between egg consumption and risk of cardiovascular outcomes"
        6y ago
endisneigh 6y ago
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.
- the-pigeon 6y ago
  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.
  - endisneigh 6y ago
    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: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/87/4/964/4633437 https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/87/4/964/4633437 ". 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.
    - airstrike 6y ago
Etheryte 6y ago
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?
- cgh 6y ago
  Serve as an example? I eat four eggs a day.
  - airstrike 6y ago
    I eat at least two a day, virtually everyday... ...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.
    - ncmncm 6y ago
      It turns out that there is absolutely nothing wrong with saturated fat, never was. Fat is necessary in human diet. Cholesterol levels don't tell you much unless you have heart disease.
  - soledades 6y ago
    Same, good egg to you my friend.
- tootie 6y ago
  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.
- undersuit 6y ago
JPKab 6y ago
"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.
- thelean12 6y ago
  This view is really bad. 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.
  - ve55 6y ago
    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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bananabiscuit 6y ago
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”
- butterisgood 6y ago
  Nutritionists HATE This trick!
  - ggm 6y ago
    Wait... are you telling me the clickbait ads in my feed might be .. public health alerts?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- UnFleshedOne 6y ago
  Selection pressure for traits that affect not stopping reading after headlines? The current climate of public opinion driven exclusively by twitter-sized soundbites won't resolve by itself...
killion 6y ago
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.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  Sci-hub is your friend. https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjmed.2020.05.046 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjmed.2020.05.... 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.
- onnnon 6y ago
  Do you eat sugar?
- Dove 6y ago
  You may be a lean mass hyperresponder - check out Dave Feldman's work on the topic at https://cholesterolcode.com/ 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.
marz0 6y ago
Yet at the same time, a recent study [1] concludes: > The results suggested that higher egg consumption was positively associated with the risk of diabetes in Chinese adults. However, it also states: > The association between egg consumption and diabetes is inconclusive. These statements seem contradictory to me, but maybe someone can shed more light on this? [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33028452/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33028452/
- timbit42 6y ago
  'Suggests' isn't strong enough to make the association conclusive.
agmm 6y ago
If you find this topic interesting, read "The Big Fat Surprise"
sedatk 6y ago
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?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
truth_feels_bad 6y ago
> 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.
foxyv 6y ago
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.
mike503 6y ago
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.
- niels_bom 6y ago
  This. 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.
- bitshiftfaced 6y ago
  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?
onnteohuonteuh 6y ago
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]. [1] https://nutritionfacts.org/?s=eggs https://nutritionfacts.org/?s=eggs [2] https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2016nl/jan/eggindustry.htm https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2016nl/jan/eggindustry.htm [3] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/digesting-the-latest-research-on-eggs-2019070317179 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/digesting-the-latest-res...
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  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.
  - timbit42 6y ago
    Except for the rice, that's a Keto diet.
ncmncm 6y ago
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. https://www.drmirkin.com/histories-and-mysteries/fred-kummerow-hero-of-the-trans-fat-battle.html https://www.drmirkin.com/histories-and-mysteries/fred-kummer... https://spacedoc.com/articles/the-truth-about-trans-fats https://spacedoc.com/articles/the-truth-about-trans-fats https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/science/fred-kummerow-dead-biochemist-ban-trans-fatty-acids.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/science/fred-kummerow-dea... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/06/02/professor-who-campaigned-to-ban-trans-fats-dies-at-102/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/0... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Kummerow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Kummerow
lanius 6y ago
>Higher egg consumption (more than 1 egg/day) was associated with a significantly decreased risk of coronary artery disease Is there an upper ceiling where the benefit goes away? I go through dozens of eggs a week.
steve76 6y ago
Preventative medicine is really tough. People die, and it goes through a progression, like pneumonia first, then the heart, then some cancer, then the kidneys. If your homeless, odds are that happens in your 30s. If your a monk, it happens in your 90s. It would be better to stop trauma. Car wrecks, falls, violence. Much more preventable. Before changing venial and innocent human behavior, a lot easier to advance medicine: Genetic blood thinners and statins. Dissolves blockages or improve circulation to damaged organs. Therapeutic imaging, radiation therapy for cardio disease. Get it good enough where it's practically a tanning bed. Non-invasive surgery, like catheter bypasses or valve replacements. Better pacemakers. That professor at the University of Chicago did some great things with turbulence. Release one of those rings full of medicine to a diseased artery, controlled with a pacemaker or IV. All more easier than stopping people from snacking at night.
ortusdux 6y ago
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. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-egg-board-investigation-20161007-snap-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-egg-board-investigati...
ogre_codes 6y ago
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.
hirundo 6y ago
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.
hsuduebc2 6y ago
This conclusion was literally opposite of what I was expecting. Wow.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
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!"
dennis_jeeves 6y ago
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.
LatteLazy 6y ago
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!
Henk0 6y ago
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.

98 points by undefined1 6y ago

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.

the-pigeon 6y ago
Is your dietary restriction list from a doctor or internet research? I would definitely consult with your doctor and not apply general study conclusions to your own diet considering you had a heart attack recently.
- monadic3 6y ago
  Better hope your doctor is reading the right stuff.
- ballenf 6y ago
  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.
- blakesterz 6y ago
  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.
tootie 6y ago
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.

sradman 6y ago

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.

cs702 6y ago
That's right, no association was found. Perhaps the title should be changed to "No Association Between Egg Consumption and Risk of Cardiovascular Disease."
- giarc 6y ago
  The association is that there is no association. So it's an accurate title.
  - derekp7 6y ago
    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).
    - kubanczyk 6y ago
      A number of studies show a direct association. As of now, the number is zero.
    - giarc 6y ago
      How would you propose they change it? They found no association between eggs and CVD and found association between eggs and CAD. "Association between egg consumption and risk of cardiovascular outcomes"
      - 6y ago

endisneigh 6y ago

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.

the-pigeon 6y ago
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.
- endisneigh 6y ago
  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: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/87/4/964/4633437 https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/87/4/964/4633437 ". 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.
  - airstrike 6y ago

Etheryte 6y ago

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?

cgh 6y ago
Serve as an example? I eat four eggs a day.
- airstrike 6y ago
  I eat at least two a day, virtually everyday... ...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.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    It turns out that there is absolutely nothing wrong with saturated fat, never was. Fat is necessary in human diet. Cholesterol levels don't tell you much unless you have heart disease.
- soledades 6y ago
  Same, good egg to you my friend.
tootie 6y ago
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.
undersuit 6y ago

JPKab 6y ago

"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.

thelean12 6y ago
This view is really bad. 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.
- ve55 6y ago
  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.

deleted 6y ago

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bananabiscuit 6y ago

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”

butterisgood 6y ago
Nutritionists HATE This trick!
- ggm 6y ago
  Wait... are you telling me the clickbait ads in my feed might be .. public health alerts?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
UnFleshedOne 6y ago
Selection pressure for traits that affect not stopping reading after headlines? The current climate of public opinion driven exclusively by twitter-sized soundbites won't resolve by itself...

killion 6y ago

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.

ncmncm 6y ago
Sci-hub is your friend. https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjmed.2020.05.046 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjmed.2020.05.... 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.
onnnon 6y ago
Do you eat sugar?
Dove 6y ago
You may be a lean mass hyperresponder - check out Dave Feldman's work on the topic at https://cholesterolcode.com/ 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.

marz0 6y ago

Yet at the same time, a recent study [1] concludes: > The results suggested that higher egg consumption was positively associated with the risk of diabetes in Chinese adults. However, it also states: > The association between egg consumption and diabetes is inconclusive. These statements seem contradictory to me, but maybe someone can shed more light on this? [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33028452/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33028452/

timbit42 6y ago
'Suggests' isn't strong enough to make the association conclusive.

agmm 6y ago

If you find this topic interesting, read "The Big Fat Surprise"

sedatk 6y ago

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?

deleted 6y ago
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truth_feels_bad 6y ago

> 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.

foxyv 6y ago

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.

mike503 6y ago

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.

niels_bom 6y ago
This. 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.
bitshiftfaced 6y ago
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?

onnteohuonteuh 6y ago

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]. [1] https://nutritionfacts.org/?s=eggs https://nutritionfacts.org/?s=eggs [2] https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2016nl/jan/eggindustry.htm https://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2016nl/jan/eggindustry.htm [3] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/digesting-the-latest-research-on-eggs-2019070317179 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/digesting-the-latest-res...

Jtsummers 6y ago
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.
- timbit42 6y ago
  Except for the rice, that's a Keto diet.

ncmncm 6y ago

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. https://www.drmirkin.com/histories-and-mysteries/fred-kummerow-hero-of-the-trans-fat-battle.html https://www.drmirkin.com/histories-and-mysteries/fred-kummer... https://spacedoc.com/articles/the-truth-about-trans-fats https://spacedoc.com/articles/the-truth-about-trans-fats https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/science/fred-kummerow-dead-biochemist-ban-trans-fatty-acids.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/science/fred-kummerow-dea... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/06/02/professor-who-campaigned-to-ban-trans-fats-dies-at-102/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/0... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Kummerow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Kummerow

lanius 6y ago

>Higher egg consumption (more than 1 egg/day) was associated with a significantly decreased risk of coronary artery disease Is there an upper ceiling where the benefit goes away? I go through dozens of eggs a week.

steve76 6y ago

Preventative medicine is really tough. People die, and it goes through a progression, like pneumonia first, then the heart, then some cancer, then the kidneys. If your homeless, odds are that happens in your 30s. If your a monk, it happens in your 90s. It would be better to stop trauma. Car wrecks, falls, violence. Much more preventable. Before changing venial and innocent human behavior, a lot easier to advance medicine: Genetic blood thinners and statins. Dissolves blockages or improve circulation to damaged organs. Therapeutic imaging, radiation therapy for cardio disease. Get it good enough where it's practically a tanning bed. Non-invasive surgery, like catheter bypasses or valve replacements. Better pacemakers. That professor at the University of Chicago did some great things with turbulence. Release one of those rings full of medicine to a diseased artery, controlled with a pacemaker or IV. All more easier than stopping people from snacking at night.

ortusdux 6y ago

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. https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-egg-board-investigation-20161007-snap-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-egg-board-investigati...

ogre_codes 6y ago

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.

hirundo 6y ago

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.

hsuduebc2 6y ago

This conclusion was literally opposite of what I was expecting. Wow.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

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!"

dennis_jeeves 6y ago

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.

LatteLazy 6y ago

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!

Henk0 6y ago

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.