Yes, Charles. This is a common finding. Healthy older people also have, on average, higher serum cholesterol than less healthy people of the same age. About 3/4 of our cholesterol is produced in the body because you need cholesterol to make vitamin D, to make sex steroids, and to make the membrane of your cells and your brain. Cholesterol is a part of your body, and a war on a part of you will never work.

Alan - there is definitely a strong genetic component to coronary disease, but there is also a very strong modifiable factor: smoking.

The health benefits of stopping everyone smoking would be much larger and more predictable than trying to modify everyone's diet.

Hi Geoff,

I have a lot of friends who keep backyard chooks, usually as part of a more or less "formal" permaculture system. I'll ask them about how much grain they have to buy and report back.

Hi Lorna. Also check the condition of the chooks. I kept backyard chooks for about 25 years and was often amazed at how poor the condition was of some people's chooks ... usually because they tried to feed them on kitchen scraps. Chooks need far more of many nutrients, including protein, than humans and this is reflected in commercial feeds. With a large enough area, they can get this naturally with insects, but a back yard won't do it.

Not sure about the environmental cost, but in terms of suffering, we've addressed that. We have back yard chooks. Hand raised from 1 day old. Nurtured and loved, they are like a part of the family. We don't use layer pellets. We give them a small amount of an organic feed (whatever that means) that we get from a bloke at our local farmers markets and mostly it's leftovers and foraging.

I would HIGHLY recommend doing this. We have a really small yard but manage to do it. It's therapeutic getting out in the yard every morning with the chooks. Gives you a warm fuzzy when you eat a fresh egg that your adored chook just laid.

Oh yeah, not sure about the nutritional side and whether or not we really need eggs, but 2 people in our house are vegos and basically, I just like eggs.

Sorry Malcolm, but I still have a problem with 'complete' protein. It implies there are incomplete proteins. This is an academic distinction hardly relevant in Australia and rarely relevant anywhere else. I wrote a program a while back which used the amino acid profiles on the NUTTAB database and the FAO essential amino acid requirements. If you define 'incomplete' as meaning can you satisfy your caloric requirements with that food but be deficient in one or more amino acids. Fair enough? Under that definition, there a very few incomplete proteins and its really hard to be deficient in any amino acids. This explains why NHMRC doesn't give any special protein intake requirements for vegans/vegetarians. It really makes no difference what kind of protein you eat provided you eat enough food.

Here's another way of looking at it. Try and find a single person anywhere in Australia in the past decade who has been sufficiently sick to show up on the AIHW databases (hospital admissions) because of "incompete protein", "unbalanced amino acid intake" or anything remotely indicating a problem (you'll need to find suitable ICD numbers). I spent a while combing the databases and didn't find anybody ... going back to to 2003. You're welcome to try and find anybody with a problem ... let me know if you do.

Geoff, your breakdown is incorrect as it is misleading. 168g/m2 is indeed 1.68t/ha of wheat and one egg may indeed take that much to produce, but to what are you comparing it? The most logical comparison would be to insects and grass. Now a high insect load per m2 is, short of a plague, low and average grass content (which is much lower quality feed than grain) is averaging ~100g/m2 during the growing season (none out of season). So you might see grain as environmentally expensive, but just trying to get chickens enough area to feed in without grain would be environmentally damaging.

But you don't like real numbers do you. Just like you prefer to use a low protein replacement food source with an assumed digestibility of 100% grown on magic soils that yield 3x what they do in Australia in your calculations to replace Aussie beef.

Tim,

"you prefer to use a low protein replacement food source with an assumed digestibility of 100%"

Here's something to think about.

Much of the health benefits of plant foods comes from the fact that they are difficult to digest.

Paul: There you go again, actually reading the papers!

Paul - the paper is making a distinction between total blood cholesterol as opposed to either HDL or LDL individually.

Sue, thanks. Yes, I can see that the cholesterol fractions and TG are isolated in the paper summary, but it still seemed contradictory to me that there was no predictive value of HDL and LDL for example.

Malcolm may have supplied the answer though. If the cohort was being treated with statins (for example) and weight loss advice, which is probable if attending a CVD clinic, total cholesterol may have declined somewhat rapidly, and possibly BMI, while plaque, I assume, would take much longer to regress (if at all). This would elicit somewhat spurious associations it seems to me.

It's not a paper we can take too much from, I agree, notwithstanding the design, being cross sectional and deficient on other dietary factors. One thing that has occurred to me over the years regarding the somewhat contradictory nature of dietary cholesterol and CVD is the possibility of confounding by saturated fat intake. Connor, I think, some years ago pointed to the synergistic nature of combined dietary cholesterol and saturated fat in raising blood cholesterol. It may be that dietary cholesterol in the absence of saturated fat might be low risk or even benign. (But why not avoid both just to be sure :-).

Incidentally, the American Heart Association still recommend keeping total dietary cholesterol below 300mg/day for healthy people and 200mg/day for those with CVD. I haven't looked up the evidence base for this advice. With eggs at <>200mg cholesterol each, that's not much room to move. I don't think we have similar guidelines in Australia . . . do we?

Alan, I think that's a very good point re: the rest of the diet. Although I'd recommend poaching the eggs rather than boiling them - they sit on the spinach better.

Sure - we'd have to ensure that these dubious studies are not picked up by the press, or oblige all journalists to actaally read the paper.

Mr Scanlon, do I detect a certain degradation in your current memory performance, or at least a rather pessimistic anticipation of retirement?

In any case, you need to go lightly on the animal products to get that memory back and ward off the Alzheimer's.

Arch Neurol. 2010 Jun;67(6):699-706. Apr 12. Food combination and Alzheimer disease risk: a protective diet. Gu Y, Nieves JW, Stern Y, Luchsinger JA, Scarmeas N.

"We identified a DP (diet pattern) strongly associated with lower AD risk: compared with subjects in the lowest tertile of adherence to this pattern, the AD hazard ratio (95% confidence interval) for subjects in the highest DP tertile was 0.62 (0.43-0.89) after multivariable adjustment (P for trend = .01). This DP was characterized by higher intakes of salad dressing, nuts, fish, tomatoes, poultry, cruciferous vegetables, fruits, and dark and green leafy vegetables and a lower intake of high-fat dairy products, red meat, organ meat, and butter."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3029147/

There you go -- all written down, just in case you can't remember it.

Okay Paul, outline for me your daily and weekly intake of broccoli for the past 40 years. Now I'll jump in my time machine and go back a prove that reported intake as incorrect.

Memory is transient and fallible, to the point where eye witness testimony has been overturned repeatedly with actual evidence - such as DNA. http://www.livescience.com/16194-crime-eyewitnesses-mistakes.html

This is a well known problem with social science studies, so your post was neither funny, nor particularly well informed. My comment was to highlight that unless someone has been keeping a food diary the data is likely to be too biased to be of any value, let alone conclude anything from.

Well then, Mr Scanlon, leave the 60 yo's alone then . . . :-).

Did you read the article or the study? I was referencing the average age of the participants. Keep up old man.

I posted the link to the full study, so I know exactly what you were referring to.

BTW, take your pick: race over 100 metres, 10k, or deadlift.

I'd suggest an IQ test as well, but I'm trying to give you a chance.

So you decided to take personal offence at a direct reference to the study? For someone who just claimed to have a high IQ you aren't making a lot of sense.

And what does how much I deadlift, run or anything else have to do with the scientific merits of this study? For the record you don't want to challenge me to any short distance running, strength exercises or mental challenges, I'm afraid you would look silly, especially as the deadlift is my best lift.

In other news, apparently exercise is good for you and can be used in combination with a healthy diet so that you don't get fat.

I don't think they'll catch on Sue.

"Moderation" can be interpreted differently by different people depending on past experiences, nutritional knowledge, cultural influences, etc.

So that very cleaver scientist who asked his subjects (pulled from a sample of university graduates) to eat every food in moderation somehow had different results to another very cleaver scientist who asked his subjects (pulled from a sample of construction workers) to eat every food in moderation.

Sure, Gary. Hence the qualification "so long as you balance nutrients, and energy intake with expenditure."

It doesn't really matter what those foods are, if you end up with an appropriate balance of nutirents and energy.

(Other news flash: other very clever scientists have found that there are a wide range of ":balanced" diets around the world, from Cantonese to Sri Lankan to Nigerian. These can vary more widely than the diets of Australian university graduates and construction workers. These very clever scientists concluded that "there is no generic human diet.")

Rosemary and Malcolm,

You both make very valid points about how this study is in no way definitive and that the media is guilty of sensationalising the results. however, in my view, the review is of much greater importance than the study, especially considering the reputation of the authors, i.e, the inventor of the glycemic index.

I have noticed that animal products hold a strange place in our society. They are considered healthy by default, without having needed to be proven healthy. In this case, you have pointed out the flaws of the anti-egg study, dismissed it and concluded that eggs are still healthy. Your logic seems to be that eggs are innocent until proven guilty. However, have they been proven innocent in the first place? Since heart disease is our biggest killer, shouldn't nutritionists recommend foods that prevent or reverse heart disease? Can eggs do this? Have there been studies that show that adding eggs to one's diet would reduce the build up of atherosclerotic plaque? I am not aware of any such study and that is why i am puzzled as to why eggs are still recommended.

Shouldn't nutritionists recommend the healthiest foods, rather than merely foods that are less bad than other foods. Rosemary, pointing out that eggs are better than fast foods doesn't really make me want to start adding them to my diet. Malcolm, you list all the nutrients in eggs and correct me if i am wrong, but isn't it better to obtain these nutrients from sources that don't contain saturated fat and dietary cholesterol? Also, you say that eggs are an inexpensive source of (complete) protein. Could one not also claim that they are in fact the cheapest and most concentrated source of dietary cholesterol? Also, as Geoff and Rosemary pointed out, isn't the completeness of protein a non-issue for anyone reading your article? Couldn't one argue that eggs aren't even the cheapest way of getting all of the essential amino acids? According to this article by Walter Willet, the chair of Harvard's nutrition department, we should "pick the best protein packages by emphasizing plant sources rather than animal sources" because your body doesn't care whether you obtain your amino acids from animal or plant sources and animal sources are inescapable from dietary cholesterol and bad fats.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3471136/

The article leads me to believe that plant protein is superior to animal protein, but judging from your use of the words "high quality" and "complete" when referring to animal protein, it seems like you think the opposite to be true. If this is the case, could you please explain your position?

I would love to hear your thoughts on these issues especially since i wish to study nutrition as of next year.

Thankyou,
Peter

H Malcolm. Thanks for getting back to me and thanks for making things clearer.

It would be good if they had actually written ''have at least''. I think they should put an upper limit too. Someone could eat fatty cheese all day and still be following the recommendations (as long as they eat the minimum amount from all the other groups). I find it hard to believe that that's healthy.

Quite right, and how many eggs or part thereof does one consume via cakes and other processed foods.
It seems to me that it was irresponsible of the media to publish such an incomplete and possibly erroneous study, where it is clearly impossible to establish definite links, due to the large number of variables.

Mike Jubow - "up to one a day" simply means "one or less" - averaged over any number of days.

Five, six or seven eggs eaten per week would be "up to one a day". Ten eggs per week would be more than one a day. No need to be annoyed - it's just averaging consumption over time.

Mike Jubow - perhaps you would prefer that they said "from zero to one egg per day, averaged across a period of 'x' days"?

The type of precision you require for pesticides doesn't apply to diet - does anyone eat exactly the same quantity and ingredients every day? That's why the quantities are averaged over a period of time - just like alcohol intake. There's nothing sloppy about it - it's a way of describing a quantity that is not consistent each day.

Rosemary and others, Jenkins has reviewed the cholesterol and heart disease risk here in a review paper:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2989358/

He concludes: "Diet is not just about fasting cholesterol; it is mainly about the postprandial effects of cholesterol, saturated fats, oxidative stress and inflammation. A misplaced focus on fasting lipids obscures three key issues. Dietary cholesterol increases the susceptibility of low-density lipoprotein to oxidation, increases postprandial lipemia and potentiates the adverse effects of dietary saturated fat. Dietary cholesterol, including egg yolks, is harmful to the arteries."

Regarding 'dietary cholesterol responders', I'm not convinced this relates exclusively to diabetics, and evidence for that is not strong in my view. If I'm correct, then how should public health nutrition professionals advise the public, not knowing who is, or is not, a responder?

Third, it seems to me that green and yellow vegetables provide sufficient lutein and zeaxanthin to cover for low egg consumption. In addition, choline has been associated with a 70% increase in lethal prostate cancer in the Health Professionals Follow Up Study.

Rosemary,

Thanks for getting back to me. It's great to get an expert opinion on these things. I haven't gone through all the studies you mentioned, but i will in the next few days when i have a bit more time.

You say
"Others (hopefully not paid by the egg industry) also do reviews and come to different conclusions - eg that the lutein and zeaxanthin in eggs protect LDL from oxidation (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20683785)";

Fernandez does receive grants from the egg (and dairy) industry. see http://www.canr.uconn.edu/nutsci/nutsci/hpg/mluz.html

You also say that "there is the compensatory effect on HDL to also consider."

Correct me if i'm wrong, but I was under the impression that the jury was still out on HDL being protective. I recently read this article on HDL which refers to some recent reviews in the Lancet. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/health/research/hdl-good-cholesterol-found-not-to-cut-heart-risk.html?_r=0)

Paul,
"Third, it seems to me that green and yellow vegetables provide sufficient lutein and zeaxanthin to cover for low egg consumption."

I think this is an understatement.
Dr Michael Greger has an interesting video on this (http://nutritionfacts.org/video/egg-industry-blind-spot/) which is easy to fact check with this. (http://www.ars.usda.gov/main/site_main.htm?modecode=12-35-45-00)

Apparently eggs can have up to 250 mcg, while a single serving of kale has nearly 24 000 mcg. Go Kale!

This probably should be in another thread, but i have to say that it is awfully strange that David Jenkins loses credibility because of his veganism, because he chooses to not consume certain products. Can you imagine a coke researcher being accused of bias because she is not a coke drinker? Isn't it strange to think that if Dr. Jenkins went out and ate a hamburger, nutritionists would take his research more seriously?
Having said that, i do see your point that his veganism could influence some of his views and findings. However, to be fair, i think we should be equally cautious of the ideology of carnism (to use Melanie Joy's word) influencing the views of meat eating researchers. Probably more so, since carnism (i.e. the idea that it's perfectly ok to eat meat) is an ingrained value that most of us learned as children, and childhood biases are the worst! See religion.

Rosemary, I didn't know Jenkins was a vegan, but I have been aware of what I consider are the 'pro-plant' advocates in the nutrition sciences, and Willett seems in that category as well.

I do have an open mind on dietary cholesterol, and as we often say, the 'dose makes the poison' and I don't think the egg/day for healthy people and somewhat less for those with elements of cardiovascular disease in an otherwise healthy diet is likely to be problematic for most people.

I'm still somewhat influenced by the AHA's recommendations on dietary cholesterol.

Even so, I don't like the message that the media often project, which is that "eggs are okay after all", which more or less gives consumers the message that it's healthy to eat a 3-egg omelette a day.

(BTW, I grew up with chooks in the back yard as well. I still remember my favourite bantam!)

Working out people's biases and where they get their money from is tough.

But at least in the research business, the listing of conflicts is
pretty well ubiquitous these days. I'm more worried about non-research conflicts.

E.g.,
Does the fact that Cancer Council gets so many donations from community groups that hold fund raising BBQs account for its going soft on red meat and bowel cancer? This needs an explanation, considering that they very publicly launched an alcohol causes cancer campaign some time ago. Also requiring explanation is why whenever there is coverage of a red meat and cancer study (pretty regularly), it is common to see Cancer Council's Ian Olver running interference for red meat. Why? Can't Meat and Livestock Australia look after itself?

Japanese bowel cancer rates have risen 5-fold with the addition of more red meat ...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17059355

and none of the other dietary changes that might be the cause are associated with bowel cancer, nor is obesity a likely cause.

The problem with most (all?) studies on bowel cancer and red meat in the west is that there is effectively no control group. It's like trying to look at the association of smoking and lung cancer without access to a "never smoked" group. Most vegetarians/vegans make the decision after decades of eating meat ... so getting diagnosed with bowel cancer after 10 years as a vegetarian mucks up the results because it ends up in the low/no meat group instead of where it should be.

The Japanese data shows what most (all?) ecological data shows. In the absence of red meat, there just isn't much bowel cancer, and rates in men and women are similar. This can't be because of "protective" foods, because the Japanese eat and ate very little fruit and not a lot of veggies. So you'd need to postulate some traditional food that was brilliantly protective but vanished a few decades ago. Once red meat arrives, males invariably eat more and bowel cancer rates diverge between the sexes and climb.

Ecological data doesn't prove a theory, but it can easily destroy one. In this case, the rise of bowel cancer, not just in Japan, but in Singapore, South Korea supports the causal link quite well. I'd expect an even bigger surge in bowel cancer in China in about 10 years.

Hi Rosemary.

I hope your having a good holiday and i hope your rooster has a snooze button :)

I read the Heart Foundation report and in my view it doesn't really paint eggs in a good light. Especially if you compare if to the section on nuts just below. Here is an extract from the nuts section

A review by Coates and Howe found a number of CVH benefits from consuming nuts, including contributing to the promotion of weight reduction, improving the lipid profile, benefiting glucose homeostasis and insulin sensitivity. A review of four large prospective epidemiological studies found a consistent cardio-protective effect with increased nut consumption. The cardio-protective effect remained for a wide range of nut (and peanut butter) intake and was also observed across different populations. The results indicated that frequent nut consumption may also prevent recurrent CHD events. The average risk reduction of CHD death was 8.3% for each serving of nuts consumed weekly (≈30 g). Intervention studies have confirmed the LDL-C-lowering effect of diets rich in walnuts, almonds and peanuts.

to summarise.

Benefits, Benifits, weight reduction, cardio-protective effect, improve lipid profile, risk reduction of CHD death, benefits, lowers LDL.

All positives. No negatives.

This was not the impression i got from the egg section. The egg section only included negatives (i.e. some studies suggest that more than 6 eggs a week increases your risk of heart failure, CHD, stroke etc) or neutral statement (i.e. some studies and reviews suggest that egg consumption is not correlated with heart disease, stroke etc.) They list some of the nutrients in eggs, but they don't talk about any benefits, at least not in the same way they do for the nut group. They don't use words like "cardio-protective effect" or "average risk reduction".

All negatives and neutrals. No positives.

This was the point i was trying to make. Sure, trans fat is worse than dietary cholesterol. Sure, the occasional egg isn't likely to harm you if you are otherwise healthy. Sure, the overall dietary pattern is more important than a single food. But clearly some foods are better than others and i think health professionals should recommend the best foods and best dietary patterns.

Last week i tried a french toast recipe that uses cashews instead of eggs. I highly recommend it. It was a big success even for the egg eaters in my family (who happen to be french).
http://support.pcrm.org/site/MessageViewer?em_id=66661.0&dlv_id=70722

@KeithThomas It's always possible to dream up an alternative theory, but there are clear causal mechanisms which relate red meat to bowel cancer so you'll need to do more than just guess. Sure some of the increase may have been due to other causes, but certainly not less fish or more sugar or pollution because they didn't increase sugar, they eat more fish, and what kind of pollution miraculously hits not just Japan, but Korea and Singapore simultaneously? & they've always been long lived. It's quite plausible that the huge size of the increase has a bit to do with a low intake of fruit and veg. The other factor contributing to the size of the increase is the reduction in salt intake (with refrigeration) which reduced stomach cancer. Before this, some people destined for bowel cancer may have got stomach cancer first.

Interestingly ... being hit by a massive 2+ Sievert radiation blast (about 2000 times the dose the near public may have got from the Fukushima failures) also raised bowel (and other) cancer risks in survivors of the WWII atomic bombings ... by about 60% ... rather less than the 500 percent recent increase.

Hi Keith and John.

When you (and your gp), say that cholesterol is essential, you are talking about the cholesterol that is produced in our bodies, not the cholesterol that we eat? Right?

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that our bodies produce all the cholesterol that we need and we don't need any from our diet.