"Does Dietary Cholesterol from Eggs Raise Blood Cholesterol?"
The question, does egg feeding (in other words, dietary cholesterol)
affect the level of cholesterol in the blood, was answered 40 years ago.
Give someone half a cup of eggs a day and within 2, 3, 4 weeks
their cholesterol keeps going up, and then stop the eggs
by switching to an egg substitute and the cholesterol comes down.
Or start people on the egg substitute and not much happens,
but then start feeding eggs and their cholesterol shoots right up.
Put people on a cholesterol-free diet and their cholesterols drop.
But then add some egg yolk cholesterol and
their cholesterol goes up.
Take it away and their cholesterol goes down.
You could do this all year. And it's within days:
10 days of eggs and cholesterol shot up 50 points.
Take the eggs away and it comes back down.
You can reproduce this effect over and over and over and over,
though evidently penguin omelets are only about half as deadly.
Switch people from a high cholesterol diet
to a cholesterol free diet, and you can drop
blood cholesterol levels as much as a hundred points.
OK, but that was giving people more than a half cup of egg yolks a day.
But even just a single egg a day can increase people's LDL cholesterol 12%.
Put all the studies together in this 2020 meta-analysis,
more than 50 randomized controlled trials feeding people eggs,
and egg consumption significantly increases LDL-cholesterol, period.
Now studies funded by the Egg Board use a variety of methods
to try to minimize the reported negative health effects of eggs
by, for example, claiming that dietary cholesterol affects
only certain people.
That's actually been put to the test, and only 3% were even
potentially "nonresponders" to dietary cholesterol,
and even these probably evidenced some adverse response.
Wait, then how was the Egg Board able to design a study in which
egg intake did not change blood cholesterol?
By feeding them sufficiently large quantities of dairy and meat.
See, there's a plateau effect.
Though all lines of evidence converge to indicate that dietary cholesterol
is a major factor in promoting hardening of the arteries,
confusion about dietary cholesterol has arisen because
above a certain ceiling you basically max out cholesterol absorption.
Check it out. If you're eating a strictly plant-based diet
with a baseline of zero cholesterol intake, and you start adding meat,
dairy or eggs to your diet,
you can get a dramatic rise in blood cholesterol.
But as your diet starts out more and more meaty, you can saturate
your system and basically max out on the additional effect.
So no wonder the Egg Board packed in the extra meat and dairy
to mask the egg effect.
A systematic review of egg industry "Funding and Cholesterol Research "
sought out to see if industry-funded studies were more likely to report
conclusions that were not supported by their own objective findings.
Of the non industry-funded studies on the effect of egg ingestion on
cholesterol, cholesterol increases were reported in about 90%.
Among industry-funded studies,
cholesterol increases were reported in about 90%.
In other words, even the egg industry funded studies showed
eggs increased blood cholesterol, and not a single study
funded by anyone showed a significant decrease.
Okay, but here's the crazy part.
About half of the industry-funded studies reported conclusions
that were discordant with their own results.
In other words, they found that cholesterol went up,
but if you read their conclusions, they exonerated eggs.
That's why you can't just read the abstract.
You actually have to see what they found.
Readers, editors, and the public should remain alert
to funding sources in interpreting study findings and conclusions.