Eggs will kill ya dead!

Today I happened to catch on the local news a story about how eggs are going to kill ya! They're going to kill ya dead, just like cigarette smoking! I just had to go find this study. Luckily the school I teach at subscribes to the journal it was in.

I have some huge problems with this study. The first is, it's not a random clinical trial. They only surveyed (yeah, nice waste of money) people coming to a vascular prevention clinic. Uh, is it just me, or do you think that people who are unhealthy, sick, and/or have a family history of illness are the most likely to go to a clinic like that?

Looking at Table 1 in the study, mean Triglycerides are high and so is BMI. So a lot of the participants are overweight. I wonder if there are any normal, healthy people in this survey? There's also a few diabetics thrown in for good measure. I didn't see where they controlled for that. But wait, because it gets better.

Table 1, click for larger version

Looking at Table 2, I almost fell out of my chair. From laughing. The people who ate the least eggs, <50 in "egg years", were the youngest. Their ages were 55.70 +/- 17.03 at first visit, so some of them were as young as 38.67 years. Now as the egg consumption goes up, so do the ages.  The people who ate the most eggs were much older. Their ages were 69.77 +/-11.38 at first visit. The youngest in the high consumption group was 58.39. That seems like some underhanded chicanery if you ask me!

Table 2, click for larger version

Of course the older people are going to have more instances of heart disease and thicker arteries too because of their age. They even state that in the article, that the older people have more plaque. Oh, but wait! The study says they "adjusted" for age. Why instead of poking around with numbers, actually study the same age groups? Or would that be because there wouldn't be any correlation? (Never mind causation.)

One could easily draw the conclusion that eggs have nothing to do with the thickness of the plaque, but with age. I could just as easily draw the conclusion that as you get older you eat more eggs. That's valid right? Or maybe the more eggs you eat, the older you get. Maybe if you never eat eggs you'll never get old? I'm screwed in that case!

It's interesting that they say that there were 2831 patients with data on egg yolk consumption, but only 1231 were used for various reasons. I'm sure those reasons were all good right, like not anything to do with throwing out data we didn't like, right? Right?

Also of interest, is that they found that fasting cholesterol, BMI, Triglycerides, HDL cholesterol and LDL cholesterol were not significant predictors of the thickness of plaque. Just egg yolks! 


In my humble opinion, considering that the sample was unbalanced, not random in the least and that more than half of the data they had access to was thrown out, that this amounts to someone with an agenda, with an axe to grind. Because if you really wanted to help people, and you really wanted to find out what was causing heart disease, you wouldn't have such poor research methods. However, if what you really want is to push an agenda, you won't care about data or ethics or anything else. You won't care if you kill people, so long as yours is the voice that is heard, so long as yours is the message that is received. Because diet is a religion to quite a few people out there, on all sides.

Just so you know, I'm my own experiment in this case. I eat at least three eggs almost every day. If I drop dead of heart disease, well, we won't know if it was the eggs that caused it, or my propensity for fountain diet cokes :P

What have they done? Genetically modifying food, low-fat, and declining mental health

I made some homemade mayonnaise today. This is the first time that I used yard eggs in it. The last few times I made it, I used store bought eggs. The yard eggs are expensive, what can I say? I have always noticed that the store bought eggs' shells seem to be very brittle and easily broken. The yard eggs have shells that you have to actually tap hard to break. If I get used to cooking with yard eggs and then go back to the store bought ones, I will make a mess hitting that first egg on the edge of the bowl, because the store bought eggs' shells shatter. What have they done to our food supply?

What prompted this post was, while I was making the mayonnaise, I noticed that it emulsified easily. The store bought eggs don't do that. It's actually kinda crazy. I remember reading that they had been breeding and feeding chickens (or more than likely genetically altering the chickens) to produce lower cholesterol eggs.

"Why the shift [in cholesterol]? The decrease in cholesterol might reflect an improvement in hens' diet, the agency says in a statement. Here's the full USDA Statement."

Because I'll turn into a pumpkin at midnight if mother nature would know what to feed a chicken!

Cholesterol is vital for cell membrane stability. If you don't understand the importance of that statement there, I suggest you pick up a basic biology text book. To top it all off, if you don't eat enough cholesterol, your body will make it for you, because you NEED it.

Add into the mix the fact that Monsanto has a gigantic monopoly on what is grown in this country, to the point that they can sue farmers because their genetically modified seeds are spread by the wind or birds, and they win(!?!?!WTF?!??!?!), one has to ask themselves, where are we going here? There will come a point (if we are not already beyond it) where there will be no turning back, and we will have permanently screwed up our food supply.

Beyond that, we come to an even more important thing. The astonishing rise of mental illness in this country. Saturated fat is important. I think that's an understatement of immense proportions. And what have they done? Told people to avoid eating fat, but especially saturated fat. Saturated fat is important for brain health. It's why we are intelligent. Our ancestors eating more saturated fat is probably what set us on the evolutionary path that we are on, and is what allowed our brains to grow bigger and more powerful. The drugs they prescribe people for ADHD, bipolar, depression and other mental illnesses like schizophrenia, do not work in the long term. The long term outcomes are actually worse for people who stay on their medication.

After one starts reading all this, they can't help but wonder if this low-fat crap is perpetuated by greed in what would rival even the most outrageous of conspiracies. By eating low-fat and high carb crap, people wreck their physical and mental health, needing drugs for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, depression (which many of the anti-depressants trigger bipolar), ADHD (which ritalin leads to violent and aggressive behavior and wrecks the development of the brain).

What have they done? The powers-that-be are profiting off of this, they have destroyed countless lives by doing so, and worse, I think they KNOW what they're doing.