(p. D5) “Intervention studies have shown that moderate egg consumption doesn’t appreciably raise cholesterol levels,” Dr. Hu [chairman of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health] said. “Low to moderate consumption of three or four eggs a week doesn’t appear to have a major effect on blood cholesterol unless the person has high cholesterol or Type 2 diabetes.”
He added, “In most previous studies of healthy people, moderate egg consumption was not associated with a significant increase in cardiovascular risk.” However, among 21,275 participants in the Physicians’ Health Study who were followed for more than 20 years, those who ate one or more eggs a day were more likely to develop heart failure than those who ate eggs infrequently.
“Contradictory findings among different studies are not unusual — it’s part of the scientific process,” Dr. Hu said. “In forming guidelines, you have to look at the totality of evidence rather than overreact to a single new study.”
Zachary S. Clayton, author of a comprehensive review of research on egg consumption and heart health published in Nutrition in 2017, said in an interview that giving two eggs a day for 12 weeks to healthy people didn’t raise any of their cardiovascular risk factors and “actually decreased their triglyceride levels.”
But, Dr. Clayton, a postdoctoral fellow in nutrition at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said, “It’s important to distinguish between hypo-responders and hyper-responders to dietary cholesterol. If someone is a hyper-responder, eating two eggs a day would increase the risk of cardiovascular disease.”
For the full commentary see:
(Note: bracketed words quoted from earlier in the commentary.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 22, 2019 [sic], and has the title “Should You Be Eating Eggs?”)
Clayton’s co-authored academic review article on the effects of egg consumption, mentioned above, is: