🙅♂️ The Case...Against Moderation?!
An Eggstreme Eggsperiment shows an interesting Eggsample of Individual Metabolism
What do you think would happen if you ate one egg per hour of every day for a month?
Your answer will probably depend on what you’ve read about the health impacts of eggs, cholesterol, and protein.
Many doctors, health “eggsperts” and gurus claim that eating an eggcess of eggs will increase your cholesterol.
But one man, who did eat 720 eggs in a month (one per hour every day), might have shown us that that’s not eggzactly true.
This lesson is not only one about having a healthy amount of skepticism (the antithesis of yesterday’s newsletter, where I argued some are too skeptical), but also about flipping the idea of moderation on its head a bit.
Newsletter Summary:
Why commonly held nutrition beliefs don’t have absolute health implications
How personal everyone’s metabolism really is
One quote to end the week
🍳What Eggs Will (Or Won't) Do For You
That’s the equivalent of up to 133,000 mg of cholesterol.
What we know is that high levels of LDL cholesterol — which, according to some “conventional wisdom,” could be raised by eating too many eggs — is a precursor to heart disease later in life.
Based on this conventional wisdom, this undertaking makes it sound as if Nick is signing himself up for a heart attack at age 50.
But Nick’s bloodwork showed otherwise.
After one week, or 150-ish eggs, his LDL cholesterol dropped by 2%, and after the month of eggzacerbated egg intake ended, it dropped by 18%.
Basically, Nick showed us that dietary cholesterol doesn’t increase endogenous cholesterol, the cholesterol in our bodies.
You can watch his full video for him to eggsplain why.
But the story's moral is that what we know about nutrients that have been recycled to us over the years might not be absolute.
In other words, the information about foods that are “good” or “bad” is often pretty shallow.
Also, while we probably shouldn’t eat this many eggs that often, it does give some credence to the idea that dietary moderation will probably look different for everyone.
If you ask someone on a certain diet why they think food is better or worse for you, they might be summarizing their eggsperience with the food (or someone else’s who convinced them the food was bad from their eggsperience).
And unless you’re a registered dietitian, it’s probably not helping someone to bias them against a food you don’t like just because it doesn't work for you.
Do you see how harmful it is to deal in absolutes with food?
Until your bloodwork shows some meaningful improvement (or regression), it’s irresponsible to claim a certain amount of a given food — especially eggs, which have protein, linoleic acid, and “good” cholesterol — could harm someone without sufficient data.
How personal everyone’s metabolism really is
Again, don’t go housing a ton of eggs right now.
From his videos, you can see Nick is a leaner individual.
The way he processes eggs — and the other things he did during this eggsperiment — will have a huge impact on how he metabolizes eggs, their protein, and their dietary cholesterol.
An N=1 of eggstreme egg isn’t perfect, but it does give some insight into what we deem “healthy” versus “unhealthy,” and Nick’s other videos will make you think twice before guilting yourself for eating something sweet or salty.
Metabolism is incredibly inconsistent from person to person.
This isn’t to say one should be completely liberal with their food intake, but you’re also not going to learn everything about your body from 1 or 2 YouTube videos, either.
For someone who is already pretty lean, it might make more sense that they could handle more eggs, more sweets, and the occasional alcoholic drink.
For someone who is teetering on overweight and has thyroid issues, it’s safe to say an egg binge of this magnitude might not be in their best interest if other things could be fixed first (cough-eggzercise-cough).
One Quote to Finish the Week
“To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art.”
– La Rochefoucauld
#MakeEatingMoreArtful
“might not be absolute.” Understatement!
Might not? Pretty much everything we’ve been told about cholesterol and its dangers is flat out wrong.
Carbohydrate overconsumption is behind the massive increase in all kinds of metabolic diseases. So since eggs contain zero carbohydrates, we could expect any month-long eggfest will result in lowering triglycerides from glucose for sure. And since insulin will drop, the signals to store fat will reduce, so the body will stop shipping so Mach fat in the bloodstream.