Is 5-6 Whole Eggs a Day Dangerous?

Nutrition
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I originally only included total numbers for brevity’s sake. Full results are below.

I’m skeptical of popular science in general. All too often popular news sites publish stories along the lines of, “New study suggests everything we though we knew about X was a lie!” The journalist, who is rarely a doctor, will then go on to draw dubious conclusions from a single study - all the while ignoring the countless studies that came before it with different conclusions. T-Nation has run a few of these types of articles as well. It’s tempting to buy into these conclusions when they seem to admonish the things we want to do anyways. Cholesterol is good now? Awesome! Load me up with steak and eggs. I’ve fallen into this trap as well, but ultimately concluded reading articles on the internet is not a substitute for 7 years of medical training, plus years of practice.

5/31/2018
total - 159
HDL - 52
LDL - 92

3/3/2016
total - 213
HDL - 60
LDL - 141

4/5/2015
total - 191
HDL - 53
LDL - 120

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23

You do not understand the amount of times I have said something to this extent to people. It’s so perplexing that people will believe the first thing they read on the internet but having a qualified person tell you point blank the correct answer is met with tons of skepticism if they even bother to talk to the qualified person at all

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24

How do you know that you’re not? :thinking:

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As a person who does research in a science field and academia, I agree. It makes my head shaking every time to my skin every time when people read an abstract of a study and conclude that to be an absolute truth. A couple weeks ago, there was an idiot in this forum who tried to argue with me just by showing me the abstract of a study.

Science is a collection of evidence. Even in physics, what people regard as the most basic science, not everything is absolute, there is a probability that you can pass through a wall according to quantum physics. You can find a few studies that show milk decreases cholesterol level but you can also find a tons of other studies where milk increases cholesterol level. Ultimately, it depends on the individual. Human beings are huge variables, it is not just x and y.

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26

I did blood test recently, my cholesterol is actually near lower end of normal spectrum.

Just my blood cell counts are not OK, but that’s probably not connected with eating eggs.

27

Egg whites are among the more common gut irritants and so they actually can cause inflammation. People’s sensitivity varies. I personally rarely eat egg whites, but I will eat 4-6 yolks maybe 3 times a week.

Once again,a 213 total cholesterol with 60 HDL is almost perfect for an adult male. I know that LDL over 120 is usually considered to be high-ish, but that’s only because the recommended total cholesterol is too low. 200-220 is perfect for a man with no personal history of heart disease, diabedtes or a high calcium score. It correlates to better health and higher testosterone levels. Also low LDL can be a sign of chronic inflammation and disease since LDL is used up when you are sick, or have colds or allergies.

Regarding your last point, my wife is a cardiologist. She has to stick more or less to guidelines and most of her patients may benefit from lowered cholesterol since they have mostly already had heart problems, but cholesterol is produced by the body to HEAL microvascular damage. “Trying” to lower cholesterol for someone without a heart disease state is probably not healthy. Anyway, I mentioned my wife, because I have seen how ACA and AMA recommendations have actually followed, NOT LED modern nutritionists, and it has tended to trail by a decade or more. Only about 3 years ago the AMA and ACA decided that fat was not inherently harmful and that there should be no daily maximum for fat as long as total calories are in target. This was espoused by nutritional science 15-20 years ago. The AMA and ACA STILL officially consider high linoleic oils to be healthy because they reduce cholesterol, but believe me, doctors who have kept up with the science rather than preaching guidelines started excluding high linoleic oils over a decade ago at least in their own diets. Those who haven’t kept up still recommend “healthy plant based oils” which happen to be pro-inflammatory omega-6, but YES, they do lower cholesterol.

You will never be able to get proper nutritional advice from someone in medical practice IMO because the nature of medical science is to proceed slowly, and also not to tell eveyone that they’ve been given bad advice for 30 years about saturated fat, whole grains, cholesterol lowering foods etc.

Doctors are decades behind on real nutritional research.

Regarding eggs, my wife mentioned to me the other day of a recent study that showed no harms or improved status in patients who ate 3 eggs per day. The study showed a progressive trend of better health markers for individuals eating 1, 2 and 3 eggs per day for 2 weeks. At the end, they made a point that this did not demonstrate anything about the potential harms of eating 4 or more eggs a day.

Plus, the “markers” generally referred to are constantly changing. Simple fact, most of the improperly developed dietary guidelines are based on one simple flawed theory, the cholesterol model of heart disease. The model is debunked in almost 100% of cases, but its derivatives persist-if a food lowers cholesterol it can be labelled as hearth healthy.

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28

Who is qualified. Doctors are demonstrably, in general, not qualified to give nutritional advice. They are tethered to old guidelines that are slowly changing, but tend to follow the research by 10-20 years. Most doctors are practiced in covering their asses with the accepted guidelines that lag behind research by a decade or more, and are also influenced by various agricultural lobbies.

29

In no way, shape, or form do I disagree with what you’re saying but like any profession there will be good employees and bad employees. That’s when it becomes the consumers responsibility to seek out the best possible service and usually the best possible service isn’t some journalist or vaguely understood study with ten people.

30

@mertdawg, you bring up some solid points. This is turning into an interesting conversation. I’m open-minded and always willing to reconider my positons, but still have my doubts.

You’re a bit of a special case then. You live with a person who has been trained to evaluate medical research. The only person I know with that background is my doctor.

Ok, so clearly there’s a relationship between high cholesterol and heart problems. What’s the logic behind waitin until after there are problems to start paying attetion to cholesterol levels?

I assume there’s a body of research going back decades or more. I’d be interested to know why recent studies show different medical outcomes wrt cholesterol. I see ACA/AMA’s cautious approach to changing guidance as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, don’t want to be super reactive to any single study. It makes sense to wait until there’s a substantial body of research supporting a certain conclusion. On the other, if you wait to long to update guidance, you could be dispensing irrelevant medical advice. You’re clearly take the second view.

I’m not disagreeing, but I think most people’s understanding is that nutrition is well within a general practitioner’s skill-set, especially nowadays with the shift toward preventative care.

31

Cholesterol, in a healthy individual, prevents heart disease because cholesterol is sent to damaged blood vessel cell membranes to reinforce them from mild day to day damage mostly caused by high blood sugar, triglycerides, and particularly triglycerides that are build from linoleic acid (omega 6) which carries oxygen free radicals to the blood vessel linings.

So the damage itself is caused by the high sugar, high linoleic acid (even though if reduces cholesterol) America diet. The body raises cholesterol to reinforce those damaged cells.

Only if the damage gets out of control, and actual calcium deposits start to build up does the cholesterol contribute to the blockage by getting lodged in the scar tissue and calcium deposits. Medical science has focused on cholesterol for 2 reasons, 1) because in people who already have calcium scarring, it may contribute to the blockage and 2) because people who have a lot of inflammation tend to produce more cholesterol to help heal the micro-vascular scarring. In the second case, the cholesterol may be the mechanism that will return the person to normalcy provided they can eliminate the cause of the scarring and inflammation. For someone without any calcium buildup, a cholesterol over 200 tends to correlate to better lifetime health than a cholesterol under 200, and there is evidence that optimal cholesterol in lieu of calcium buildup is in the 220-265 range. So understand that in a normal state, the body makes the cholesterol it needs. It is also the reason why blood cholesterol usually has no relationship to dietary cholesterol intake. (The ACA no longer has a cholesterol guideline, or at least is in the final stages of eliminating it).

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32

It’s funny how they scapegoat cholesterol but the reality is that the bulk of health problems are a result of overeating junk. It’s shocking that a person can be both obese and malnourished.

And I’m talking about the majority of American cases. I might not make a good doctor but I’d tell people to drop 50 lbs instead of taking meds and changing their diet to lower cholesterol. Lower everything!

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33

We’ve known that moderation is the key to longevity for millenniums now, but it’s a very hard product to sell.

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34

Is there a good metric for measuring the damage cause by the damage you describe? Something else I should be looking for in my blood work maybe?

35

Yes you can have a test done called a calcium score. What is surprising about calcium score tests is that endurance runners often have very high calcium scores.

36

By the way, if you want to do something that will definitely decrease your chance of having a heart attack, don’t become an endurance athlete. Running may improve health up to about 25 miles a week, but starts to raise heart disease risk fast above that level.

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Is this the calcium test you’re referring to?

F Calcium 9.6 8.7-10.2 (mg/dL) BN

9.6 was the measurement. 8.7-10.2 is the “reference range”

Duly noted!

38

I will ask my wife tonight but I believe that a calcium score is done with a heart image test like an MRI.

(Edit, its a C.T. scan, they do measurements on the picture to assign a score)

39

Thanks for the reply!

I think I’m tracking now. They’re essentially measuring the rigidity of the blood vessel walls, right? Pretty sure my dad had this done recently.

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I think so. If you don’t have a high calcium score, then for the most part, cholesterol is your friend. High cholesterol can be a SIGN of chronic stress but that doesn’t justify artificially supressing it.

41

You need some porn here

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Eggs need a little flare. For breakfast I added boiled potatoes, onions, bell peppers, cheese, homemade pico de Gallo, some beef chorizo, and 3 eggs. Had heated 6 corn tortillas spread out through the morning. My blood work is all goooood so I just had to share what I put eggs through. Poor chickens have no idea what to do.

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