Why You Shouldn't Eat More Than One Egg a Day

Omelet lovers, I apologize for this one in advance.

The whole ‘yolk or no yolk’ debate has been hot the griddle for what seems like forever. Sure, a single yolk contains more cholesterol than many other foods but it also comes along with healthy nutrition like omega-3 fats. But if cardiovascular disease is a major concern, you might want to cut back on the egg consumption altogether.

Chayakrit Krittanawong, MD, from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and colleagues collected data from PubMed, Scopus, and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews up until April 2015. Only studies with a 95% confidence interval and included hazard ratio (HR) or relative risk (RR) were examined. Their findings were displayed in a poster session at the American Heart Association 2015 Scientific Meeting (AHA 2015) in Orlando, Florida.

The main objective here was to determine if there was an association between egg consumption and cardiovascular disease risk — and there is. The researchers looked at 11 studies which followed subjects for a median of 13.1 years. Out of the 301,339 individuals, there was a total of 10,262 cardiovascular disease events, including 7,225 coronary heart disease cases and 3,037 strokes. They considered subgroups as a potential cause of differences.

“Compared to consumption of less than 1 egg/day, higher egg consumption was associated with an increased risk of [cardiovascular disease] events (pooled HR, 1.43…and pooled RR, 1.09),” the authors confirmed. Indeed, a higher egg consumption slightly upped the risk of coronary heart disease and stroke.

A recent study found that men who ate eggs more frequently were less likely to develop type 2 diabetes — so they can’t be all that bad, right? On the bright side, this may be the perfect excuse to skip the sunny side up order and eat more pancakes instead.

“Large and diverse prospective community-based cohorts will be necessary to establish optimal dietary recommendations for public health,” the researchers concluded.