By Adam Garcia
In Diabetic Lifestyle today, we are going to show you the truth behind the myth of eggs having bad cholesterol. I find the conclusions of the following new research to be counter-intuitive and therefore especially interesting, because it now appears that eggs can actually improve our level of good cholesterol when the conventional wisdom still damns them.
Due to this new research, I ate my breakfast this morning without guilt. My breakfast consisted of two strips of bacon, two eggs, a small bowl of oatmeal, and coffee. This is the usual American standard, except that I left out the usual toast, jelly, and hash browns that would have given me more carbohydrates than I wanted. Of course, I added a little salt and salsa to my eggs.
Understand that it wasn’t the saturated fat in the bacon or the caffeine in the coffee that had made me feel guilty. It was all that cholesterol in the eggs that made me accountable, but like I said, this morning was the first time I didn’t feel culpable.
“Why don’t you feel guilty anymore?” you may ask. For me, it was this new book called “Good Calories, Bad Calories” by Gary Taubes. In his new book they have destroyed the myth that fat is bad for our hearts, the major complication of diabetes.
Of all the foods we eat, eggs are the highest in cholesterol, except for animal organ meats. One large egg has about 213 milligrams of cholesterol — all of which is in the yolk. “If you are healthy, it’s recommended that you limit your dietary cholesterol intake to less than 300 mg a day,” according to the Mayo Clinic. However, “If you have cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or high LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, you should limit your dietary cholesterol intake to less than 200 mg a day.” This is the conformist wisdom that made me feel guilty whenever I sat down to enjoy my bacon and eggs for breakfast.
Why the concern about dietary cholesterol? Most health authorities, including the American Diabetes Association, still recommend low-fat diets. This is the legacy of Ancel Keys, a doctor who was all too persuasive for our own good. He persuaded the American medical establishment that fat is bad and carbs are good when those experts bought into his analysis of the “Seven Countries Study.” That study seemed to show a strong association between cardiovascular disease and intake of saturated fatty acids.
It didn’t. One of the great strengths of Gary Taube’s new book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories”, he thoroughly exposes the flimsy evidence linking dietary fat with heart problems. The emperor, Keys, figuratively wore no clothes. As long ago as 1937 in the Annals of Epidemiology two Columbia University biochemists, David Rittenberg and Rudolph Schoenheimer, “demonstrated that the cholesterol we eat has very little effect on the amount of cholesterol in our blood,” according to research that Taubes cites in “Good Calories, Bad Calories.” Also, “When [Dr. Ancel] Keys fed men for months at a time on diets either high or low in cholesterol, it made no difference to their cholesterol levels.”
Now new research goes even further, in this new study, “Eggs Modulate the Inflammatory Response to Carbohydrate Restricted Diets in Overweight Men” by Joseph C. Ratliff and three associates at the University of Connecticut will show that eggs are actually anti-inflammatory. This placebo-controlled study tracked 28 overweight men who followed a low-carb diet. For 12 weeks 15 of them ate three eggs per day and 12 ate a substitute. The anti-inflammatory effect of the egg-rich diet was “possibly due to the presence of cholesterol.” This diet increased their level of HDL (“good”) cholesterol and the antioxidant lutein, a potent antioxidant found in egg yolks.
Furthermore, eggs are good at helping us to feel full, according to the satiety index. They are 50 percent more satisfying than white bread. Similarly, a 2005 study in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, “Short-Term Effect of Eggs on Satiety in Overweight and Obese Subjects,” showed that 30 women ate about 686 calories less for lunch after eating either about 760 calories from eggs or the same amount from bagels for breakfast. Even 36 hours after breakfast, the egg consumers ate fewer calories than the bagel eaters.
This new research on the cholesterol in eggs has set my mind at ease when I eat my eggs for breakfast. I would like to thank Gary Taubes for revealing the truth behind the myth that eggs have bad cholesterol.
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