Health - Resources and discussion for everything health-related

I see those egg council creeps got to you too

If you get your diet info from sources that profit from your attention you're forever going to be confused about whether eggs are deadly and your wine makes you live longer.

Someone not willing to learn should get their advice from a dietician if that's an option. Those willing to learn should dive a bit deeper and question assumptions. This article assumes cholesterol is bad and should be minimized. Is that true? Why? How does cholesterol operate in my body? Who might be profiting from this assumption? Is cholesterol a major factor in a sugar metabolism disease (diabetes)?

About 20% of cholesterol comes from direct consumption. And about 80% comes from sugars and fats. According to this article (https://www.massgeneralbrigham.org/en/about/newsroom/articles/how-is-cholesterol-produced). Cholesterol is the parent compound to all the steroidal hormones, including pregnenalone, DHEA, testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, and vitamin D. So one needs cholesterol, just not too much of it. Oxidized cholesterol turns out to be associated with pathophysiology, in atherosclerosis (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7836017/), and Alzheimers disease (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4473000/) One needs sugars and fats, but the amount is dependent on how one uses those compounds. And the body uses them in all sort of ways, including energy production for exercise.

It's a subject I'm always curious about - not eggs specifically, but cholesterol intake, serum cholesterol, and heart disease.

A few years ago, I had a physical and my doctor said my cholesterol was high, but he also said there was a contraindicator, and he didn't want to put me on statens unnecessarily, so he had my get a coronary calcium scan, which is like a CT scan of your torso and they can measure how much buildup is in your arteries. The ranges are:

• 0 = no calcified plaque detected (risk of coronary artery disease is very low – less than 5%)
• 1-10 = calcium detected in extremely minimal levels (risk of coronary diseases is still low – less than 10%)
• 11-100 = mild levels of plaque detected with certainty (minimal narrowing of heart arteries is likely)
• 101-300 = moderate levels of plaque detected (relatively high risk of a heart attack within 3-5 years)
• 300-400 = extensive levels of plaque detected (very high risk of heart attack, high levels of vascular disease are present)

I was in my late 50s, so something like 50 would be typical, but it came back as zero. I had relatively high cholesterol, but zero plaque buildup in my arteries relatively late in life.

I'm told that the relationship between cholesterol intake and heart disease isn't well understood, and that there's certainly a genetic component. Articles and studies like this one always catch my eye.

What's a "fortified egg"?

We have known for years that dietary cholestorol does not directly translate to blood cholestorol. More confirmation still good, but this is not exactly new information.

University of Granada in Spain has made many studies including a multi year one of people consuming eggs. Conclusion: you can eat as much as you want.

I don't think you can make a study about "fortified" eggs and apply the findings to normal eggs (look at the title). Also The Big Egg funding is certainly a red flag, as well as article being in the headlines even though it's not even published yet. I'm honestly sceptical.

I had a high cholesterol reading that coincided with me eating a lot of eggs all of a sudden (I bought a lot when the price went down after the first ridiculous price gouging and then needed to finish them before they expired) but I was eating 4+ eggs a day and maybe the sudden diet change contributed. I think there's some correlation between eating eggs and increased cholesterol levels, but what I'm wondering more about is the effects of cholesterol itself. It can depend on the individual and it's not necessarily as simple as a single number. It wasn't that long ago when cholesterol was just assumed bad and there wasn't even a distinction between "good" and "bad" cholesterol.

regardless, chickens don't deserve what we do to them. It's time to stop