The most interesting thing to me about eggs is not that the cholesterol in a single egg, eaten daily, can shorten a woman’s life as much as smoking five cigarettes a day for 15 years.1 Nor is it that those in a 2012 study who ate the most eggs had two-thirds the arterial plaque of the heaviest smokers in the study, with habits comparable to a pack a day for 40 years or more.2 Eating only three eggs a week was shown to substantially increase plaque buildup.
No, the most interesting thing to me is the behavior of the egg industry, which, mirroring the two studies above, has remarkable parallels with the behavior of the tobacco industry.3
The egg industry has been slapped on the wrist repeatedly for decades, by institutions such as the USDA, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the US Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court, for “false and misleading advertising that eggs had no harmful effects on health.”4
In 1977, the National Commission on Egg Nutrition, a major trade group, was convicted of false advertising by the US Court of Appeals and ordered to “cease and desist from disseminating any advertisement” that “represents that there is no scientific evidence that eating eggs increases the risk of heart attacks, heart disease, atherosclerosis, arteriosclerosis, or any attendant condition.”5
The FTC has twice brought cases against Eggland’s Best, Inc., in 1994 and 1996, for making “deceptive” advertising claims like:
“Imagine eating delicious, real, whole eggs and not raising your serum cholesterol. People did. In clinical tests of Eggland’s Best eggs. They ate a dozen a week while keeping within the limits of the Surgeon General’s low-fat diet. And . . . their serum cholesterol didn’t go up.” 6
The USDA has reminded the egg industry repeatedly that, due to laws against false advertising, “you can’t couch eggs/egg products as ‘healthy’ or ‘nutritious’ . . . Nutritious and healthy carry certain connotations, and because eggs have the amount of cholesterol they do, plus the fact that they’re not low in fat, these words are problematic.”7
This is a list of advertising claims about eggs that the USDA has told the egg industry they cannot use, because they’re not true:
• “A rich source of protein”
• “Nutritional powerhouse”
• “Relatively low in calories”
• “Relatively low in fat”
• “Low in saturated fat”
• “Eggs contribute nutritionally”
• “Healthful”
• “Eggs contribute healthful components”
See, under the FDA, a food can only be labeled “healthy” if it is low in saturated fat and contains 90 mg or less of cholesterol per serving.8
The egg scorecard on healthy: fail-fail. But a little thing like that doesn’t stop the American Egg Board (AEB).
“AEB devised an integrated, 360-degree media approach to surround moms . . . wherever they are,” declared AEB’s 2008 annual report.9 The AEB newsletter, Eggstra!, shows a photo of a young mother and her daughter. Images of marketing tactics, like TV, bill-boards, internet, women’s magazines, and egg cartons, “surround” the pair, with arrows aiming in toward them.10
The crosshairs are on moms, “because they are the primary shopper, food decision maker, and meal preparer for the household.”11
In 2014, Hellmann’s Mayonnaise, produced by Unilever, which had revenue of $64 billion in 2017 and is the world’s largest producer of food spreads,12 sued Hampton Creek, a small $50-million-a-year13 start-up that makes egg-free mayonnaise. Hellmann’s claimed Hampton Creek was guilty of false advertising because you can’t call something “mayonnaise” if it doesn’t contain eggs.
Internal AEB emails were leaked to The Guardian, revealing that the egg industry had been trying for months to destroy Hampton Creek. The egg-free company, as AEB president Joanne Ivy wrote, is “a crisis and major threat to the future of the egg product business.”14
Apparently Hampton Creek presents such a “crisis and major threat” to the egg industry that some senior AEB officials were fantasizing about murder.
“Can we pool our money and put a hit on [Josh Tetrick, Hampton Creek CEO]?” emailed one senior AEB member. “[I could] contact some of my old buddies in Brooklyn to pay Mr. Tetrick a visit,” wrote AEB’s executive VP in another email.15 Tricky thing about emails: you can’t always tell when someone is joking.
This is all fascinating to me, because there would be no reason for this behavior if the egg industry had a healthy product to sell in the first place. And it seems like they know it.
BUT THERE’S BEEN A LOT OF MEDIA ATTENTION ON RESEARCH CLAIMING eggs and cholesterol are not so bad for you after all.
“As a cardiologist actively involved in looking at people’s arteries, heart disease, and heart attacks, cholesterol is still very much an issue,” Dr. Kahn told us. “Many egg and cholesterol studies were done in people eating diets already overloaded with animal-based fats. Their cholesterol is 230, 240—the average American cholesterol—and when you add in several eggs a week, you don’t see much change. If you’re smoking 20 cigarettes a day, smoking 19 or 21 will probably not make a profound difference to your lung cancer risk.”
In 2015, a meta-analysis examined 40 studies on dietary cholesterol, ranging from 1979 to 2013. The authors found that consuming cholesterol in the diet significantly increased both the level of total cholesterol in the blood, as well as the levels of unhealthy (low-density lipoprotein, or LDL) cholesterol.
The Guardian, in an article subtitled, “The US government has removed suggested caps on cholesterol consumption in a victory for an egg industry keen to dissociate its product from heart disease,” writes:
The discrepancy between research saying eggs do not have an effect on cholesterol and research saying they do might boil down to a single point . . . Put plainly, said [Dr. J. David] Spence [one of the authors of the study comparing arterial plaque in smokers and egg eaters], the American diet already contains so much that could cause harm, it’s hard to measure the effect of a single potentially unhealthy food.16
A scientific study on eggs and cholesterol in the American Heart Journal stated, “We found no evidence of adverse effects of daily egg ingestion on any cardiac risk factors in adults with CAD [coronary artery disease] over a span of 6 weeks.”
But halfway through the report, I read this:
Disclosures. This study was conducted with funding from the Egg Nutrition Center/American Egg Board and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Close reading of the study’s tables reveals that 90.6 percent of the subjects were taking cholesterol-lowering medication.17
“AEB-funded research continued to provide strong evidence that eggs do not contribute to heart disease,” declared the American Egg Board Annual Report.18
That doesn’t seem right.
But regardless of funding, scientists can’t just lie in their reports.
What can a scientist funded by the egg industry do when they’re confronted with a study like one from France, showing that as the dietary fat and cholesterol content of their subjects increased, so did the fat and cholesterol in their bloodstream?19 Or another well-designed study, published in The Lancet and conducted by the Harvard Medical School, which found that adding only one extra-large egg a day to the diets of healthy young vegetarians for three weeks caused their cholesterol levels, including their dangerous LDL cholesterol, to shoot up?20 Or the Physicians’ Health Study, which found, looking at over 21,000 men over 20 years, that eating one egg a day increased the risk of dying by 23 percent?21
You can get around these inconvenient results by only measuring fasting cholesterol levels in the morning, seven or eight hours after the previous meal, as Dr. Greger explained to me—because, as the authors of the study comparing the risks of eggs and smoking wrote in an editorial, “Fasting LDL cholesterol levels . . . have little to do with what the patient consumed the previous day.”
So if you wait an entire night to measure cholesterol, there won’t be a big difference between people who had eggs for dinner and those who didn’t. Pretty clever.
“Diet is mostly about the postprandial state,” continues the editorial. “Postprandial” means the period after eating a meal. “Dietary cholesterol increases cardiovascular risk, probably mainly because of postprandial effects: for several hours after a high-cholesterol meal there is an increase in oxidative stress, vascular inflammation and adverse effects on endothelial function, and oxidation of LDL cholesterol is increased by nearly 40 percent. Dietary cholesterol is permissive of the harmful effect of saturated fats.”22 Meaning, cholesterol in your food can make the destructive effects of saturated fat even worse.23
The only foods containing cholesterol are derived from animals.24 And one of the most concentrated sources of dietary cholesterol in the US population, by far, is eggs.25
“How many hours are there between meals?” Dr. Greger asks in a NutritionFacts video. “Maybe four hours between breakfast and lunch? So if we had eggs for breakfast we’d get that big spike, and by lunch, start the whole cycle of fat and cholesterol in our arteries all over again. Most of our lives are lived in a postprandial state, in an after-meal state, and this shows the amount of cholesterol in those meals—they actually used eggs in this study, so the amount of egg in our meals makes a big difference when it really matters—after we’ve eaten, which is where we spend most of our lives. So that’s why when the Egg Board funds a study, they only measure fasting cholesterol levels the next day.”26
“THE YOLK OF A HEN’S EGG IS THE MOST CONCENTRATED GLOM OF saturated fat and cholesterol on the planet,” Dr. Klaper said. “It is made to run a baby chicken for 21 days with no outside energy. When we put that into our bloodstream, our blood gets thicker and more viscous. It changes our hormone levels and raises our cholesterol levels. Two scrambled eggs for breakfast sends a wave of fat and animal protein through your bloodstream first thing in the morning.”
Apart from eggs contributing to cardiovascular disease, heart attacks, stroke, and death in the general population, the Physicians’ Health Study, the Nurses’ Health Study, and the Health Professionals Follow-Up all demonstrated that people with diabetes who eat more than one egg a day double their risk of heart disease and death, compared to people with diabetes who eat less than a single egg per week.27
Twice the risk of death is bad enough, but in a study from Athens, Greece, “two findings are consistent across genders and models: a striking positive association between egg intake and diabetic mortality, implying that increased daily intake by one egg (40g) increases the risk of death overall threefold and the risk of coronary death more than fivefold.”28 (Italics added.)
In other words, one egg a day for people with diabetes can triple their risk of death, and quintuple their risk of dying from heart disease.
Eggs can also double the health risks for men with prostate cancer, which, if you recall, is the second most common cancer in American men.
Every 20 minutes a man in the United States dies from prostate cancer, which after a year totals over 26,000—enough to fill any NHL or NBA arena with dead men. Every year. One out of every seven American men will get prostate cancer. And while the five-year survival rate for men diagnosed while the cancer is still within the prostate is over 99 percent, the survival rate plummets to 28 percent if the cancer spreads to the bones, organs, or lymph nodes. This is why it’s vital, for the nearly 2.8 million men currently living with the disease, that prostate cancer not be allowed to progress.29
Harvard researchers monitored about 1,300 men with prostate cancer for two years, looking for links between their diets and the progression or recurrence of their cancer. The scientists found that men who ate even the smallest amount of eggs—less than one a day—doubled the risk of their cancer coming back or worsening, compared to men who very rarely ate eggs.30
This may have something to do with choline, a concentrated substance in eggs. A higher risk for prostate cancer is linked to high levels of choline in the bloodstream.31 And the same research team from Harvard, examining almost 48,000 men in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, found that “choline intake was associated with an increased risk of lethal prostate cancer.” Men who ate the most choline increased their risk of dying from prostate cancer by 70 percent.32
Another study found that “men who consumed 2.5 or more eggs per week had an 81% increased risk of lethal prostate cancer compared with men who consumed less than 0.5 eggs per week.”33
Two and a half eggs a week is far below the 2017 American average of 275.2 eggs a year per person.34
The thing about eggs, even if you never crack a single one, is that they’re frequently hidden in items like baked goods, canned soup, artificial and natural flavoring, frosting, pasta, pretzels, and salad dressing. You can get plenty of egg in your diet without ever knowing it, especially if you’re allowing yourself a “small” number of eggs per week.
The choline found in eggs, just like the carnitine found in red meat, metamorphoses into trimethylamine35 with the help of bacteria in the intestines of meat eaters.36 And trimethylamine of course is oxidized in the liver to become TMAO, aka the Molecule from Hell.
A research team from the Cleveland Clinic fed each of their study subjects two large, hard-boiled eggs. Their TMAO blood levels jumped after eating the eggs. They were all healthy adults with no chronic illness, no active infections, and low-risk cholesterol levels.37 All it took were two eggs to flood their bodies with a toxic metabolite strongly correlated with heart attacks, strokes, and death.38
EGGS, LIKE DAIRY, ARE POTENT LITTLE GRENADES OF BIO-ACCUMULATED contaminants. Remember dioxins, the incinerator pollutants? The dioxin levels in eggs39 may be the reason why one study showed that consuming more than half an egg daily was connected to doubled or tripled risks for cancers of the breast, prostate, mouth, colon, and bladder, versus people who ate no eggs.40
Dioxins get into chickens and eggs the same way they get into cows and their milk. It spews out from incinerators and falls on crops, which are then fed to animals. A Netherlands study found a “clear linear” relationship between chicken feed containing a moderate amount of dioxins eaten by laying hens, and a rapid spike in dioxin levels of their eggs. “The current EU dioxin limit for feed cannot guarantee egg dioxin levels below the EU-limit,” the scientists warned.41
And then there’s Salmonella, which sickens about 1.2 million Americans every year and kills around 450.42 Eggs are a major source of Salmonella poisoning.43
Eggs leave a hen’s body through the same passage as her feces.44 Eggs contaminated that way tend to contain Salmonella in the egg white.45 Bacteria inside the hen’s ovaries can also colonize an egg before the shell is formed.46 If the ovary is infected, then the yolk tends to contain the pathogen.47
The largest egg recall in US history—over half a billion eggs—took place in 2010, due to a massive Salmonella outbreak.48 About 1,500 people were sickened,49 with classic Salmonella symptoms of bloody diarrhea, fever, cramps, and vomiting.50 Ironically, the recall took place one month after the FDA released a 71-page “egg safety rule,” hoping to prevent exactly that kind of outbreak.51
This was not good PR for the egg industry.
But bacteria can be cooked to death, can’t it? Hard-boiled eggs are recommended as the safest cooking method—but Salmonella can survive even in eggs boiled for eight minutes.52
The egg industry, probably sick of the bad press, decided to do a little research of their own. So the Egg Nutrition Center/American Egg Board funded a study looking into the safest ways to cook eggs and get rid of that pesky Salmonella.
They most likely anticipated positive results.
But the scientists on the egg industry payroll firmly concluded that scrambled, over-easy, and sunny-side-up eggs, due to bacterial concerns, were not safe to eat.53
Now that’s incredible.