4 Huge Egg Myths That Refuse to Die

[Music] hello and welcome to Zoe shorts the bite-sized podcast where we discuss one topic around science and nutrition I'm Jonathan Wolfe and as always I'm joined by Dr Sarah Berry and today's subject is eggs eggs are one of the most nutrient dense foods they're relatively cheap to buy they have a long shelf life and they're widely available but they're nowhere near as popular as they used to be so Sarah what has led to the decline of the egg various factors could be at play here Jonathan and I think I can explain why eggs have fallen out of favor and why we could be seeing a Resurgence in popularity how exciting let's get to it [Music] so we did some research and in the 1950s before there was any big advertising for eggs in the U.S here in the UK people were instructed to go to work on an egg as part of a popular marketing campaign the idea was that if you ate an egg for breakfast this was the best way to start the Working Day and when our good friend Tim Spector describes the humble chicken egg he often Compares them to nuts which sounds a bit weird but stay with me for a minute a nut is eventually going to grow into a tree and the egg is going to grow into a chicken it's a little more complex than that but both are packed with nutrients in order to support that growth yeah Jonathan so whole legs are nutritionally rich they Supply almost every nutrient the human body needs except fiber they're even sources for some Harder To Source nutrients like vitamin d and vitamin B12 what about their health benefits I think over the last few years in fact few decades there's been a lot of debate on the health benefits or indeed the risks of eggs the majority of recent research suggests that eggs pose no risk to our health and much more likely to actually provide health benefits in fact eating eggs alongside other food can help our bodies absorb more vitamins they can make us feel full for longer and one study found that adding an egg to salad can increase how much vitamin E we get from the salad amazing so we also found out that at the end of World War II eggs were more popular than ever and on average an American consumed seven eggs a week in the USA and we know this because in 1909 the U.S department of Agriculture began to track egg consumption so we we have 110 years of you know egg history eggs is still popular but there has been a decline in popularity since the end of World War II and the most recent data from the U.S suggests that the average American consumes now about five eggs a week now eggs are really popular because they're incredibly versatile products to cook on their own and that doesn't even take into account the hundreds of recipes that include eggs so Sarah if they're healthy they're cheap and they're versatile why aren't they as popular as they used to be it's because of the previous link between eggs and cholesterol so in 1968 the American Heart Association announced a dietary recommendation that all individuals consume less than 300 milligrams of dietary cholesterol per day and no more than three whole eggs in a week so Sarah you know I have a personal story about this basically doctors told my dad and millions of people like him that eggs could cause high cholesterol in his blood and so as a result he loves eggs but he completely cut down it became a sort of guilty weekend treat so it's like oh I've been really naughty and I'm gonna have sort of two eggs on a Sunday became the way that we all were brought up to think about eggs yeah that's a real shame and for a long time eggs were thought to be bad for your heart because of their cholesterol content now a larger contains around 200 milligrams of cholesterol but in the last decade research has shown quite clearly that at normal intakes of cholesterol so maybe around 300 milligrams a day dietary cholesterol has actually very little influence on a person's blood cholesterol levels however because of all of this guidance and sort of Public Health Information the idea that eggs were an unhealthy food was widespread and again personally you know I grew up thinking that eggs were much less healthy than you know highly processed carbohydrates such as you know white bread or pasta or white rice yeah once a food gets a bad name Jonathan it's really hard to shake it and eggs have really struggled with this labeling for the last 50 years mainly because of this misconception around dietary cholesterol and so is this why there are still people eating egg white omelettes rather than the whole egg and I'm sort of struck that sometimes you go to a fancy hotel and they offer you you know egg white omelet which is clearly like way more work than anyone is going to do at home I think is that where this comes from um I think there's a couple of reasons I think firstly because most of the cholesterol is in the yolk so people think oh if I don't eat the yolk then I'm not going to get high blood cholesterol which like I've said is not the case but also a lot of people choose to consume only the white part of the egg because it's really high in protein so it's really high in what we describe as a complete protein and I've never heard that term before Sarah what is a complete protein so it's something can nutrition we use a lot and a complete protein is a food source that can retains an adequate proportion of each of the nine essential amino acids that are necessary in the human diet and amino acids simply put other building blocks of protein got it so it's got all the bits that you need in order to you know give all the protein that I would need as a human being explained a little bit more about the difference between the yolken and the white yeah so the biggest difference between the two is that the egg whites have almost no fat content but I think it would be really irresponsible to say that the egg yolk is bad it also contains a wide range of important minerals and it's actually the most concentrated part of the egg in terms of the minerals whereas the white contains really low concentrations of these nutrients but then does have the high protein content so it does feel like another one of these examples where you're throwing away a lot of the nutritional value of the food because of this health scare 50 years ago you know as we often find you know you're processing this in some way aren't you it sounds to me like you probably better off if you're going to have the egg you know having this whole whole bundle yeah you know this is the problem with uh nutrition research and nutrition misinformation is the amount of miscommunication out there and misconceptions based on either old research or incorrect research and eggs is a great example I just before we leave egg whites for people who are saying well you know I I still really like the egg white that's what I want to have what about egg whites that we can buy you know in a supermarket out of a carton does that have the same nutritional value as egg whites from a freshly cracked egg that we might do when we're you know baking and separating the the yolk from the white so I think they're really handy for some people who are going to discard the egg yolk because it means that they're reducing waste because they're only purchasing the egg white and hopefully the yolk that's been extracted from that at the point of manufacture is being used for something else but often these egg whites have gone a pasteurization process and they often contain other ingredients or fillers they might have gums or artificial coloring for example so it's really smart to look at the ingredients as you should really with any processed foods just to make sure you know what you're getting and I guess one of the magical things about an egg right is that there's been no processor seen and it just can sit there for weeks before you eat it it's quite rare for a food um and uh you know in some senses it is Nature's sort of ready prepared processed food isn't it yeah I think they're a great convenience food and unfortunately in a food environment that we live where most great convenience foods are actually really not great for our health I think eggs are a really good example of a great Convenient Food that can also be great for our health as well now I think we do or now have to talk about how many eggs you've stated that eggs are overall good for us is it possible that we you could have too much of a good thing like with anything you can still get too much of a good thing um but I think actually before we get really into how many eggs we can or we can't eat we need to be really clear that the current research shows that blood cholesterol levels are not related to your dietary cholesterol intakes within normal ranges and this is because the reason that the eggs were given a bad rap was because of the cholesterol content of eggs and it was believed that if you increase how much cholesterol you eat you increase your blood cholesterol we now know that for most healthy adults the evidence shows it's safe to eat one to two eggs a day although it will depend a little bit on how much other cholesterol you are having in your diet so if you're consuming loads of liver for example also has loads of cholesterol you might be wanting to eat less than one a day there is another myth out there Jonathan about if you've got high cholesterol or other risk factors for heart disease you need to cut eggs out of your diet now again you need to be a little bit more mindful if you have high cholesterol about consuming really high cholesterol content foods such as eggs and such as liver but the evidence would show that at low intake so one or less a day it's still perfectly safe to consume eggs and I think I would just add that although I don't have eggs every day having discussed this a lot with you and Tim I certainly keep away feeling pretty comfortable that if I want to have you know three eggs of scrambled eggs or fried egg or whatever for my brunch I shouldn't really be that worried about it yeah I think it also depends very much on your background diet so if we could look at some of the evidence out there for a moment there was some research published that looked at egg intake and background diet so people's other components of their diet and looked at their risk of cardiovascular disease and what they found was that if they separated people out according to where they were living so when they looked for example at the population in America they actually found that the egg consumption was associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease when they looked at Europe and Asia they found that there was no association with egg consumption and cardiovascular disease so when they delved a little bit deeper to see well why why can Americans not eat eggs but why can Europeans eat eggs they disentangled that actually it wasn't anything to do with the eggs it was to do with this background diet composition so it was to do with the other kinds of foods that people consume in America when they typically consume room an egg so it's a different ways in which the eggs are used whether it's as part of an ingredient or whether it's part of a more ultra-processed meal as might be the case for example typically in the U.S and this is the problem that I've always done in the US and the UK we tend to associate eggs with like this big fried breakfast with all of these foods that we know are really bad for you so it's packaged up with something like that as opposed to something where you're having this eggs with otherwise like whole food and plants and all the rest of it I guess you're in a very different sort of a overall dietary pattern Sarah yeah and this is why we need to be really careful when we look at headlines in the newspaper which makes it really difficult for a non-nutrition expert to really know what's the real truth going on here because the food we eat is so complex and it's very much shaped by all of the other foods that are in our diet but also something else I think that's really interesting Jonathan is we know that people respond differently as well to dietary cholesterol and they also make cholesterol in their liver differently so it brings up this whole concept that you and I often talk about around personalization that actually we might not all respond the way in the same way 2X and it might be that some people can consume a lot more dietary cholesterol and it have no impact on their blood cholesterol whilst other people might need to be a little bit more mindful but despite this I still think that the evidence shows having an egg a day even if you're someone that's slightly more sensitive to dietary cholesterol is acceptable I think that's that's really interesting to understand and I guess the last thing on this that you often talk about is sort of the substitution right so what would you eat otherwise and I think in my own case um one of the things that I've done is I now eat more egg and less bread so historically I would have had like a lot of bread for this which would normally be like breakfast or brunch and maybe one or maybe two eggs and actually I'm now probably having a lot less egg I'm having olive oil on it instead of butter if I'm frying the eggs I'm frying in olive oil and so my sort of view is well maybe I'm having the three eggs and that's maybe that's a bit more than I should have on one day but actually if I think about that total plate I know as somebody who struggles with the impact of the blood sugar when I'm eating the bread actually I'm pretty confident I've switched to something that is much better for me and it's because of the well what would you eat you know if you took the eggs off the table you know if you're going to put bread and jam on it you're probably probably in a you know in the worst place for most people right rather than in a better one yeah it's a really important Point Jonathan that adding a protein and fat to any carbohydrate-rich meal is going to have a number of favorable effects it's going to first reduce your post-meal blood sugar Spike which we know has unfavorable effects in terms of inflammation we also know that it reduces your blood sugar dips which is what some people get in blood sugar about two to three hours after consuming carbohydrates and the reason we want to stop this dip is because we know people that have this dip have an increase in hunger and energy intake and we know that it also increases or suppresses our appetite and so there was a really interesting study where they fed individuals Bagels like you have now one day they fed the individual's bagels with egg and the other day they had Bagels without egg but they made them ISO caloric so they had equal energy so the day that they didn't have the the egg they still have the same amount of energy but they just had more Bagel the people that had the egg on top of their Bagel felt Fuller for a lot longer so they had their appetite suppressed for a longer period of time despite having the same calorie intake and we know that there's um you know the unfavorable effects as well of the high carbohydrate bagel on its own anyway so that's like a double benefit as well amazing so having I think done quite a lot of work today Sarah to to rescue the egg are there any other downsides to eggs that we should be aware of I think it's worth noting that from a planetary Health Point of View so thinking about carbon emissions for example as well as an animal welfare point of view some people may choose to avoid eggs and I think personally it's really important to say that you know conditions the for many Farm chickens continue to be terrible and this is even in the UK and the EU where laws are really strict so I'd suggest if it's possible for you to opt for free range eggs but I do know that this is difficult at the moment due to bird flu now Sarah uh at the time of recording this there's actually a nationwide egg shortage in both the US and the UK you know linked to bird flu as you've just mentioned and many large stores are limiting the number of eggs that can be purchased by customers uh you mentioned the stigma around eggs their cholesterol levels is part of the reasons the egg fell in popularity but it seems like demand is actually higher than it was you know a decade ago yes Jonathan so in 2016 the U.S government dropped its warning regarding eggs and regarding dietary cholesterol which I think is a real stamp of approval that it's no longer a concern and in that year alone we saw a six percent rise in egg consumption in the U.S here in the UK we know that the demand for eggs spiked during the covert pandemic probably because of lots more people are doing home cooking and home baking but numbers are still nowhere near as high as they used to be but it does seem that public opinion is changing on eggs and sales are continuing to rise fantastic so Sarah if you're going to wrap all of this up together what would your advice be for a listener who's trying to figure out okay you know can I have eggs tomorrow morning I think that they're a great source of nutrients for adults and for kids they're a really easy and accessible food they're a great complete source of protein and I think that they can be enjoyed as part of a really healthy diet I would suggest don't overdo it but I think a level of one egg a day you're perfectly healthy and it's actually a good component of your diet and I think as Sarah said I think we of course do recognize the planetary impact you know we had a whole podcast talking about this any time that you're eating a food where first of all you're having to grow a whole bunch of vegetables then it's going through an animal it's extremely inefficient so that means that the carbon impact and the footprint is much higher so I think we need to recognize that and I think also some very fair questions around you know Animal Welfare for chicken and from any other animals but if we think I think directly about the the health impact of of the egg it sounds to me Sarah as though the egg manufacturers of America and Britain should be throwing you a Ticketek parade I must say that none of my research has ever been funded by the egg industry I appreciate that clarification wonderful well if you'd like to understand your own responses to fat and discover how many eggs are good for you you may want to try Zoe's personalized nutrition program to improve your health you can get 10 off by going to join zoe.com podcast I'm Jonathan Wolfe and I'm Sarah Berry join us next week for another Zoe podcast thank you [Music]

Channel: ZOE

Views: 171,342

Keywords: Eggs, Health, Nutirition, ZOE, cholesterol, diet

Id: -RkdZcMCtwE

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 27 2023