Even over the past week can be difficult as I realized when I started tracking my food in MyFitnessPal. Unless consistently tracking, it's pretty easy to be very far off from what you actually eat.
That's assuming people are even trying to be accurate. Many look on the past with rose tinted glasses and forget about indulgences and snacks.
These studies are plague on the industry and need to go away.
Maybe many of those who consumed more eggs or cholesterol simply just ate more.
If the study simply tracked calories, maybe calories would be found to be correlated with CVD risk.
Problem with that, you can't really track what some people eat for 30 years.
The biggest issue I have is with using non-linear models. I don't have access to the full article so I don't know why they chose the statistical methods they did, but I'm suspicious that they don't report P values for what it seems should be linear relationships. I don't buy the non-linearity argument in the summary. Once you get into non-linear regression models the risk of overfitting gets worse. There is a lot of work that has to be done to show you've accounted for this, and it's hard to tell from the summary if that was done.
They also didn't control for some things I would have liked to see. Namely, calories and weight gain. So, it could be that all this study is really showing is a relationship between overeating, weight gain, and CVD and all-cause mortality. It may simply be that people who eat more calories and end up being overweight are also more likely to eat a lot of eggs and cholesterol. In this case, it's gaining weight that causes health issues, not the eggs. It's just the case that people who eat too much and are overweight also happen to eat a lot of eggs. What I'd like to see is a study where they control for calories consumed, weight gain, lean mass etc. and then see how a diet with more cholesterol performed against a diet with less cholesterol.
Egg yolk is a major source of choline. Fatty liver disease has seen a dramatic increase since people have removed eggs from their diets.
This study is questionable as other commenters have mentioned. I'm not buying the "eggs are bad" sentiment again.
Are we talking eggs here? Or Egg McMuffins with side orders of hash browns, drizzled with ketchup?
Did it also account for frequent egg-eaters tendencies to maintain a particular kind of diet regarding other foods, and other similar associations?
Yes, eggs are good way to ingest cholesterol, but in the classic American diet, they are certainly not the only way. It feels suspect for them to pull eggs, and only eggs, into the spotlight.
The key difference is "Among US adults..." versus "Among Chinese adults..."
Hmmm, maybe it's not the eggs?
Edit 1. My comment was made on a submission, which I did not think would gain much notice. Oops. Low quality comment to the fore!
Edit 2. Really though, I eat a couple of eggs a day. I should scale it back anyway, as a hedge, and eat non-traditional (In USA) breakfasts, like rice and beans.
It isn't ethical to lock people up and feed them a steady diet of something we might thing is going to cause them to develop some disease. So we have to rely on mostly self-reported data collected over extended periods of time.
That being said, I think the first pushback against eggs had to do with their high amounts of cholesterol. It was original assumed that dietary cholesterol intake was related to blood cholesterol levels. Which is something we now know to be false.
However, eggs are very high in saturated fats. The American Heart Associate still recommends that these be limited (from all sources) because there is a good deal of evidence that saturated fat intake contributes to elevated LDL cholesterol.
I generally trust AHA recommendations, but they are not free from bias, as they have food companies as "corporate supporters."
An article by Glenn Greenwald (of interviewing Snowden fame) on Ag Gag laws [1] made me realize that, at least in the US, eating bacon meant I was supporting some real fucked up shit.
I'm not opposed to meat, I just bought a whole beef, but I definitely took a hard look at where my meat was coming from.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missin...
Sign me up.
There is a huge debate currently, between government endorsed diets, plant-based, and keto, and each group is able to cite numerous studies that contradict the others'.
IMO what's "safest" right now is to follow empirical observation and cleave to a pattern that is successful, rather than trying to break down the important parts and construct your own diet from those pieces.
Anything else is hogwash, because calories are not calories.
Less convincing to me is the full-on keto diet itself. It's great that it exists as it started an excellent conversation on diet, but I rule it out because most cultures' dietary staples have been starchy carbs.
The problem imho is:
- It's too easy to overconsume carbs in modern lifestyles, and some of the carbs we consume spike our insulin too much (certain GMO crops in particular).
- It's too easy to consume non-whole-food carbs. Whole foods come with things that reduce the metabolic burden of eating them (fiber, antinutrients like phytates, antioxidants).
- The people who subsisted on carb-based staple foods led significantly more active lifestyles in the past than most people today, and did not have the abundance of food that we do now.
