This Popular Breakfast Food Item Is Not Linked To Any Heart Attack Risk

A large-scale study has found no substantial link between eating eggs and cardiovascular risk, blood fat levels, and mortality. The findings of the study were published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Previous researches have published their findings associating egg consumption to a heightened risk of heart disease and eventual death. The new study, however, contradicts many of these early findings.

What Experts Say

According to Dr. Juliet Gray, a registered nutritionist in the UK, findings of the new research is significant as it includes a more varied population compared to past studies. All of the UK’s major heart and health advisory bodies now agree that the cholesterol found in eggs has no noteworthy effect on heart disease risk. This fact was proven by the latest research in this specific area.

Contradictory findings shown by a small number of studies used older retrospective information from higher-income countries. This made it more likely that consuming egg is linked to an unhealthy diet, as well as other factors associated with wealth, which are risk factors themselves for heart disease.

New and More Solid Findings

Researchers based at the Population Health Research Institute, McMaster University, Canada, have analyzed findings from three long-term global studies. This included data from approximately 177,000 people coming from 50 countries. Researchers assessed the relationship of egg consumption with cardiovascular disease, blood lipids, and mortality in populations from high-, middle-, and low-income countries.

The researchers revealed that over 146,000 individuals they studied came from 21 countries in the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology study. They used food frequency questionnaires tailored for each country in recording egg consumption.

Another 31,544 patients suffering from vascular diseases in a couple of multinational prospective studies were also examined. In the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology or PURE study, after excluding those with CVD history, researchers found higher egg intake was not pointedly linked to blood lipids or total mortality. The same results were derived from the two other studies.

Based on what they found, the researchers concluded that there is no significant relationship between egg consumption and mortality, blood lipids, or major CVD events. They revealed this conclusion was reached after studying more than 177,000 persons, 13,658 CVD events, and 12,701 deaths from 50 countries located in six continents.

The Population Health Research Institute research authors said that contradictory findings on the effect of egg consumption on diseases are mostly based on studies done in high-income countries. For their part, the National Health Service said that eggs are a good option as part of a healthy diet.