Eggs and other dietary sources of cholesterol have long been on the list of foods that should be shunned if you want to keep your heart healthy. But is that list changing?
Eating Eggs Won’t Hurt the Heart:
A new study has found that eating eggs does not appear to raise the risk of heart disease or atherosclerosis in carotid arteries. Researchers in Finland tracked healthy, middle-aged men for more than two decades. At the start of the study the men filled out detailed dietary surveys to identify their eating behavior.
One third of the participants were at high risk for both heart disease and dementia. That’s because they carried the ApoE4 gene that predisposes people to both conditions.
What the Finns Found:
When the data from Kuopio, Finland, was analyzed, the scientists could find no relationship between cholesterol intake or eating eggs and the actual risk of heart attacks or strokes.
Perhaps it is time to lift restrictions on cholesterol-containing foods and recognize that the early prohibitions were based more on beliefs than data.
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, online, Feb. 10, 2016
Other studies have also found that eating eggs can be part of a heart-healthy diet (Nutrients, Sep. 3, 2015). High egg consumption doesn’t even raise blood cholesterol for people with type 2 diabetes (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Apr., 2015).
