Unscrambling the Science Behind Eggs and Heart Health
Sworn off eggs because you heard they were bad for your heart? Turns out, eggs have a complicated history with heart health. Because cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death worldwide, and diet plays an important role in the development of CVD, there is a good deal of research interest in examining the relationship between diet and CVD. As such, a new observational study examined the relationship between egg consumption and CVD, delivering a much-needed sunny side to the science.
Researchers used data from an ongoing observational study of more than half a million adults aged 30 to 79 from 10 different locations in China. They narrowed their focus to people who had not been previously diagnosed with cancer, diabetes or CVD, resulting in a sample size of just over 461,000 people. Participants were asked how often they ate eggs, along with other questions about their diet and health history, and were stratified by level of egg intake. Then the highest and lowest levels of intake were compared: 13 percent of participants reported eating eggs daily (amounting to about ¾ of an egg per day), while 9 percent said they never or rarely consumed eggs (about ⅓ of an egg per day).