Press Releases
Egg a day OK for healthy people
NEW YORK, Apr 20 (Reuters Health) -- Eating one egg per day does not increase a healthy person's risk of heart disease or stroke, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health.
However, the study of over 100,000 people did suggest a link between egg consumption and heart risk in diabetics, a finding that ``warrants further research,'' write Dr. Frank Hu and colleagues at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts. Their study is published in the April 20th issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.
``Our data suggest that consumption of up to 1 egg per day is unlikely to have substantial overall impact on the cardiovascular disease among healthy men and women,'' the researchers report.
Public health advocates have long recommended that individuals limit their cholesterol consumption to 300 milligrams per day. Eggs contain approximately 213 milligrams of cholesterol each, leading to the traditional advice about limiting egg intake.
To investigate the impact of eggs on cardiovascular health, the Harvard authors examined data from two major US studies involving over 127,000 men and women followed for up to 14 years. They report finding ``no evidence of an overall significant association between egg consumption and risk of coronary heart disease or stroke in either men or women'' in individuals who reported eating one egg per day.
These findings did not applied to diabetic individuals, however. According to the researchers, diabetics who ate at least 1 egg per day doubled their risk for heart disease compared with diabetics consuming less than one egg per week. Overall, eggs were the source of nearly a third (32%) of the total dietary cholesterol of the study subjects.
So why isn't daily egg consumption harmful to the cardiovascular health of healthy adults? Hu's team point out that despite their high cholesterol content, eggs contain substantial amounts of healthy nutrients. ``It is conceivable,'' they write,``that the small adverse effect of cholesterol in an egg... is counterbalanced'' by the effects of ``...other nutrients including antioxidants, folate, other B vitamins, and unsaturated fats.''
``We hope the Harvard research will encourage the nutrition policy community to re-examine dietary recommendations intended to reduce heart disease risk,'' said Dr. Donald McNamara, executive director of the American Egg Board's Egg Nutrition Center. ``Severely restricting nutritious foods, such as eggs, from the diets of all Americans can actually do more harm than good in most cases, particularly for nutritionally vulnerable groups like children and older Americans.''
In a statement, American Heart Association (AHA) spokesperson Dr. Alice H. Lichtenstein says ``these new data do not conflict with the AHA's recommendations that healthy individuals consume no more than 300 milligrams of dietary cholesterol per day -- about the amount found in an egg.''
However, she points out that eggs are often associated with the consumption of other fatty, unhealthy foods, including bacon, red meat and whole milk. And Lichtenstein notes that ''most people eat two eggs, rather than one egg in a serving-- a single meal that contains double the amount of suggested (daily) dietary cholesterol.''
SOURCE: The Journal of the American Medical Association 1999;281:1387-1394.