Oh boy, where to begin with this one? CNN just recently released an article called “Is eating egg yolks as bad as smoking?” In this article, it discussed how the dangers of smoking are comparable to the dangers of eating egg yolks as far as cardiovascular disease. The cholesterol in the egg yolk is what supposedly makes them so dangerous, and people with high cholesterol have a higher risk factor for heart problems. When I was prepping for my first bodybuilding show, I was eating 30 eggs a day, and up to 18 of them included the yolk. I have always had good cholesterol levels, but when I made visits with my doctor during this diet, he was amazed at how much better my cholesterol levels had gotten. He asked me what I had done to improve these levels even more than before, and I told him that I had been eating a lot of whole eggs. He looked at me baffled but told me to keep doing whatever I’m doing because it’s working.
Before freaking out about the word cholesterol, you must first know that there are two types of cholesterol. There is LDL, which is bad cholesterol, and there is HDL, which is good cholesterol. What most people don’t know about the egg yolk is its ability to lower your LDL (BAD) cholesterol and increase your HDL (GOOD) cholesterol. This is most likely one of the reasons why when I was eating so many eggs that my levels dropped. Eggs have gotten a bad rap over the years, but research has proven these bad theories on whole eggs false time and time again. In fact, the egg yolk is the most beneficial part of the egg because it contains all of the essential amino acids and half of the protein! Did you know that eating only egg whites can lead to a biotin deficiency? Biotin is necessary for the growth of cells and the metabolism of amino acids and fats. A biotin deficiency can become very dangerous if left untreated and even fatal! Unfortunately, not too many people know about the dangers of eating egg whites without the yolk. The yolk prevents this deficiency from occurring.
One crucial piece of information that was only briefly mentioned in the article had to do with the patients being tested during this research study. The patients were all of a mean age of 61.5 years old and they had all either suffered from a previous stroke or high blood pressure. Now, how can you run an accurate test on the dangers to your heart from egg yolks when every patient has suffered from heart related problems in the past? Sounds a little biased to me. This is almost as bad as setting up a drowning experiment for people who don’t know how to swim. It’s completely setting them up for failure! I would like to see the study on healthy-hearted individuals and egg yolks, but this unfortunately wouldn’t create the same shock-value that the media seems to be after here.
It’s a complete embarrassment that they would even try to compare the dangers of egg yolks to smoking. Smoking has been proven to be bad for your health and even has an age requirement for use. If egg yolks are this dangerous, I think they might want to consider raising the age of egg yolk use to 18 at least. When it comes down to it, eggs are one of the healthiest items in a diet. They increase good cholesterol, lower body fat, and are a great source of protein. If we want to compare something to smoking, we need to lay off of the innocent egg yolks and start putting more focus on the over-use of saturated fat. Saturated fat has actually been proven to increase cholesterol. For people with high blood pressure, try cutting down your saturated fat intake and taking in a few eggs a day, and there is a pretty good chance you will start seeing some good changes in your cholesterol levels. Just for fun, I tried looking up how many people are killed by egg yolks per year. Surprise, Surprise! I couldn’t find any statistics. When yolks catch up to the millions of people that die from smoking each year, then we should have something to worry about.
Check out this interesting article for more information on whole eggs:
CNN’s original article on egg yolks:
http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/15/is-eating-egg-yolks-as-bad-as-smoking/
-Tom