Medicine is a great tool for discovering the truth – however, at times, fallibly. Today’s axioms could be tomorrow’s discredited ideas. There are myriad instances, but take the example of the cholesterol-rich egg yolk: vilified by the medical profession over the last few decades, it now occupies a pride of place as a dietary ingredient.
Egg power cannot be underestimated. Housewives get a chill when their prices soar. Hoteliers have nightmares when there is a scarcity of eggs. Like soaring prices of onions, soaring prices of eggs also have the potential for a “coup d’état”. Scrambled, poached or sunny side up, they make food palatable and pump in energy and oomph. I am told the 400 kg heavyweight Indian pugilist, King Kong, ate 40 eggs a day and that helped him get the better of his otherwise respectable adversary, Dara Singh, who only gulped 20. Egg power? Of course!
Here are at least four things you probably didn’t know about eggs: they help brain development; they are perfect protein; calorie for calorie, you need less protein from eggs than you do from other sources to achieve the same muscle-building benefits; and, eggs can help curb your evening snack cravings.
The Scrambled Facts: The last two decades demonized foods high in fat and cholesterol. Cholesterol-rich egg yolks too came under a cloud. It all started when famous researcher Ancel Keys claimed that after looking at the average diets of populations in seven different countries he was able to determine that those who ate the most animal fat and eggs had the highest rates of heart disease. Today the pendulum has swung back. Scientists believe Keys’ analysis was flawed.
The Sunny Side of Things: To prove him wrong, more evidence has come now to light. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a meta-analysis — the collected findings of 21 different studies — which stated that “saturated fat and intake of eggs was not associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease or stroke”.
A study by the British Medical Journal in 2013 also concluded that intake of one egg every day is not associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease or stroke.
Faced with these facts doctors decided to re-analyze some of Dr. Keys’ data. They concluded that it was excess sugar intake (rather than excess saturated fat intake) that correlated best with heart disease. What is more, when you reduce fats you invariably eat more carbs (sugars), which is not good. To scientist Teicholz, that is a bad trade-off: carbs break down into glucose, which causes the body to release insulin and store fat with all its deleterious effects. As if to re-confirm the above, a just-published paper in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine emphasizes that a high carbohydrate diet is more damaging to our heart and brain arteries than a diet that is high in fat and eggs content.
Significantly, Time magazine which had in a 1984 cover story claimed that eggs and other high-fat foods were dangerous reversed the argument earlier this year. Lamenting that for decades fat has been the most vilified nutrient, they bring to light new findings that reveal that it is not fat what hurts our health.
So what is the real cause of heart attacks? Dr. Wolfe suggests that it lies in the “inflammation” caused by “chronic stress levels, the overconsumption of vegetable oils and processed carbohydrates.” Modern research corroborates the primordial role of “inflammation”. Exactly how inflammation plays a role in heart attack and stroke remains a topic of ongoing research.
The Hard-Boiled Truth: If you have been avoiding egg yolks, you could be missing out on a world of good nutrition. Eggs are a great source of nutrients that energize the brain and muscles, and are necessary for a healthy pregnancy. The saturated fat in egg-yolks is also necessary for hormone production and the body’s absorption of vitamins and minerals.
All said and done, what advice do we give our patients? First of all let’s not jump to definite conclusions and start consuming eggs à la King Kong. “An ounce of caution is worth a pound of cure”. Second, until we have fresh guidelines from world-experts regarding saturated facts, whatever we eat let us do it in moderation. Today, in medicine, meta-analytical studies – which conduct research about previous research – often give the lie to old concepts so that the once held axioms turn out to be tomorrow’s discredited ideas.
And the turmoil in the field of medical research often leaves us poor mortals at the mercy of medical grandees and not unoften floating in an ocean of uncertainty.
(Dr. Francisco Colaço is a senior consulting physician and pioneer of Echocardiography in Goa)
