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Are Eggs Harmful For The Heart? Being part of our diets, eggs are good source of high-quality protein with low saturated fat and no trans fatty acids. They also contain many fat-soluble Vitamins, say A, D, E, and K, folate, riboflavin, Vitamin B12, choline, and selenium. Although not as abundant as red meats, eggs are also a source of CoQ10 depending on how they are prepared. While egg is no doubt nourishing, all of the egg’s Vitamin A, D and E are in the egg yolk, which has a lot of cholesterol. A large yolk, on average, contains about 200 mg of cholesterol, more than 50 percent of the recommended daily intake of 300 mg for healthy individuals and 100 percent of the daily requirement for those with heart disease. Eggs contain phosphatidylcholine (lecithin), too. Study had shown that dietary phosphatidylcholine is digested by bacteria in the gut and is eventually converted into a compound called TMAO, which is linked to increased heart disease. So, how many eggs can people consume without raising the heart disease risk?
In 1997, a study on 10,802 healthy men and women suggested that egg consumption could raise risk of death: a higher mortality rate was linked to higher egg consumption. The participants were followed for 13.3 years. The findings were published in the November’s ‘Heart’ journal by researchers from University of Otago (New Zealand), University of Oxford and University of London. 2 years later, data from the Framingham Heart Study indicated that there was no association between egg consumption and heart disease among more than 900 men and women after 16 years of follow up. The average weekly egg consumption in the Framingham study was 6 per week for men and 4 per week for women. Meanwhile, the 1999 Harvard School of Public Health study of 37,851 men and 80,082 women also suggested that consumption of up to 1 egg per day is unlikely to have substantial overall impact on the risk of coronary heart disease or stroke among healthy men and women. According to Harvard Medical School Physicians' Health Study on more than 20,000 male American physicians published in 2008 in the ‘American Journal of Nutrition’, consuming up to 6 eggs per week had no major effect on the risk of heart disease, stroke, and death. But consumption of more than 6 eggs per week is linked to a modest but significant higher risk of total mortality. Same year, another published paper on the Physicians' Health Study in ‘Circulation’ journal suggested that infrequent egg consumption was not associated with the risk of heart failure but daily egg consumption was related to an increased risk of heart failure among American male physicians. Thus far, different results had been shown in various findings. This is possibly because of the significant variation in response by individuals to dietary cholesterol. About 75 percent of people are normal responders (or hypo-responders) who have little or no increase in blood cholesterol with a high intake of dietary cholesterol. But the remaining 25 percent are hyper-responders who can have higher level of LDL (low-density lipoprotein) and HDL (high-density lipoprotein) cholesterol with dietary cholesterol intake. But even for those hyper-responders, the hike in LDL and HDL cholesterol by dietary cholesterol was modest, comparing to the impact of saturated and trans fatty acids on LDL cholesterol elevation. Furthermore, the cholesterol elevation by dietary cholesterol does not alter the LDL/HDL ratio. Hence, based on the current data, people who have heart disease or diabetes should not consume 1 egg or more per day, as this could be harmful to their health. However, for those with no major risk factors for heart disease or stroke or those whose cholesterol levels are well controlled with cholesterol lowering medications, consuming 1 or more eggs per day with a low-fat diet does not seem to increase the risk of heart disease significantly.
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