Go Ahead—Eat That Egg
BU researcher applauds dropping cholesterol warning
Lynn Moore’s research suggests there really is such a thing as the proverbial good egg.
Moore, an epidemiologist and a School of Medicine associate professor of medicine, has studied the effect of eating eggs on cardiovascular risks such as blood pressure and lipid levels. With a large egg holding 186 milligrams of cholesterol, she says, “eggs have typically been considered the main target for dietary cholesterol reduction.” It’s the wrong target: her results show “that there are no negative effects of egg consumption on lipids, glucose, or blood pressure.”
The scientific community agrees, as the nation’s leading nutrition advisory panel recently deep-sixed its four-decade-old advice against cholesterol in Americans’ diet. (The panel retained its warning against so-called bad cholesterol, or LDL, as well as a red flag for any cholesterol for diabetics and others with certain medical conditions.) Recommendations remain in place for consumers to avoid foods heavy with trans fats and saturated fats.
Moore (SPH’87,’93) was senior author of a MED study that pinpointed protein—including in omelets—as an essential shield against high blood pressure. BU Today spoke with Moore about the advisory panel’s turnaround on cholesterol.
BU Today: Is dumping the anticholesterol warning a good move, and did it surprise you at all?
Moore: This change in advice is really not all that sudden. To put it in a global perspective, many other Western countries have no dietary recommendations for cholesterol intake and focus instead on limiting, in particular, trans fats, which do have adverse effects on blood cholesterol levels. And actually this current change in dietary guidelines is in keeping with one earlier put forth by a 2013 American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Task Force. Recommendations to limit dietary cholesterol first evolved in the 1960s and had little scientific foundation. Subsequently, a number of individual studies and more recently meta-analyses, combining data from a variety of clinical trials, also found that there is not an association between dietary cholesterol, or egg consumption, and coronary heart disease.
While the advisory panel suggests not worrying about cholesterol, is it necessary to distinguish between good and bad cholesterol? Which common foods contain the latter and should still be avoided?
Actually, I think there is a very common misunderstanding underlying your question. The “good” and “bad” cholesterol refer to cholesterol levels in the blood. The current shift in cholesterol guidance refers to dietary cholesterol and is based on the fact that there does not appear to be a scientific reason for its avoidance. However, the adverse impact of certain cholesterols in your blood—e.g., small particle LDL—on cardiovascular risk is not in dispute.
Even with the new policy, are there at-risk people who should still avoid cholesterol? Who are they?
These guidelines are for the general public. There has been some suggestion that dietary cholesterol should still be limited among individuals with type 2 diabetes, but this warrants further study.
With such news, people often throw up their hands and complain that they never know which nutrition advice to follow—“I gave up eggs for nothing.” Can you offer any consolation for them?
Probably not. Studying the long-term health effects of diet and individual nutrients is a complicated field, and the methods for carrying these studies out are still in development. We are moving more and more toward identifying biological markers of diet, and this will help in providing unbiased assessments of intake. Other technology-based assessments may help as well.
There are many things that contribute to the inconsistency in diet-related research, including the inherent biases and difficulties involved in the research, the poor quality of many such studies, and our failure to separate out individual dietary factors from the individual’s overall diet and lifestyle. I think that the consolation that people can take from the current news is that they should feel free to reintroduce eggs—including the yolk—into their dietary repertoire. After all, dietary variety is one of the true joys of living.
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