Egg Article-What do you think?

[Mrs_S]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/eggconsu...abeticmenstudy

Interesting.

[quotidianlight]

Re: Egg Article-What do you think?

In that study they didn't track or even record any other factors so for all we know they were eating those eggs with 3 cup sides of hash browns. It's science so wait three days and they'll have another study saying 6 eggs a week cures cancer

[Chicklady]

Re: Egg Article-What do you think?

All I can say is.....remember in the late 70's, early 80's, they told us to switch to margarine? We're all guinea pigs. I wonder how many centuries from now it will be before our experiments benefit someone

[kate58]

Re: Egg Article-What do you think?

A couple of things jumped out at me from that article. First it says 6 eggs a week causes no problems, 7 causes problems. Give me a break! One extra egg is the tipping point???? If your eggs are big do you hit that early? If you eat pullets eggs can you have 9? It's ridiculous.

The second and most intersting thing is that the main effects were noticed on those with diabetes - which leads the report to theorise that "diabetics might somehow convert dietary cholesterol more readily into blood cholesterol than people without diabetes" What arrant nonsense! How about an alternative theory "The high carb diet officially recommended for diabetes causes an increase in bad Cholesterol and makes people's diabetes worse".

Remember these are diabetic doctors that are being studied. I bet they adhere to the high carb officially recommend diabetes diet in the main. Which in my opinion renders the study meaningless to anyone eating low carb.

And anyway, any study that looks at one food in isolation from others in the diet like this is entirely pointless and no conclusions can be drawn from it. This is the kind of junk science that gives nutrition research a bad name.

[HulaMom]

Re: Egg Article-What do you think?

I don't buy it and here's why.
Let's stop and think about what humans were eating 5,000 years ago. They were eating what the body was naturally designed to eat. They would have hunted and gathered. Wild meat, nuts, vegetables.
One of their staples had to be eggs. It would have been the easiest protein to gather. It is renewable. It is the most basic whole food that we have.
How in the world can eggs now be the problem.

[EmDee]

Re: Egg Article-What do you think?

why do you say eggs would have been easy to gather? I don't think there were many hen houses 5,000 years ago and wild fowl do not generally leave their nests out in the open.

I think it would have been easier to catch and kill small mammals.

[Chicklady]

Re: Egg Article-What do you think?

Actually, "in season" eggs were probably abundant, much like fruit and vegetables were seasonal before agriculture came to be. Most wild birds do not lay eggs year round; they have a built in signal based on light and temperature, depending on the bird.
I wonder too, if the southern humans would have been more evolved to eat frquent eggs than those who journeyed northward.

[dpaca]

Re: Egg Article-What do you think?

I posted this link before, but since I think it is a good experiment highlighting the positive effect of eggs on cholesterol here it is again.

http://health.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=108677

Also, I did this experiment myself. I had my cholesterol checked out before I decided to re-start atkins and I was Ok but still nearly borderline, something like 190. Anyway I read this article and I decided to only eat boiled eggs for a week. I went back a week later and my cholesterol was down to 175. Everyone inlcuding the biochemist that took my blood was shocked. Apparently with a so called healthy diet it takes months to reduce cholesterol that much. Well before i did the one week of eggs, I was eating only fruits and vegetables and low fat and my cholesterol was higher. So I hope this helps, and if you can try it yourself.

[Mrs_S]

Re: Egg Article-What do you think?

dpaca-i remember reading your other post with this link and i use this as my "defense" so to speak when i am getting some resistance to all the eggs i eat!

i just wanted to post this article to get everyone's opinon, and i agree...it doesn't seem based on sound evidence and i will continue to eat my eggs everyday all week long!

[dpaca]

Re: Egg Article-What do you think?

dpaca-i remember reading your other post with this link and i use this as my "defense" so to speak when i am getting some resistance to all the eggs i eat!

i just wanted to post this article to get everyone's opinon, and i agree...it doesn't seem based on sound evidence and i will continue to eat my eggs everyday all week long!

COOL

[matawguro]

Re: Egg Article-What do you think?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/eggconsu...abeticmenstudy

Interesting.

The problem is that this is an observational study. Observational studies don't prove anything. They are used as a way to create hypotheses that wiil be used in controlled studies.

I could explain the problem with observational studies, but Dr. Michael Eades does such a good job explaining at his blog.

As discussed many times on this blog, basically what happens is this: the researchers release the results of an observational study. The press picks up on the conclusions and makes hay with them. A later double-blind, placebo-controlled study shows that the hypothesis generated by the observational study was wrong. Then the press picks up that study and makes hay with it. It’s like the old (very true) saying that no matter what the outcome of a legal dispute, the lawyers always win. In the case of medical studies, the press always wins.


How many times have you seen articles with the headline saying something along the lines of Substance A shown to increase the risk of cancer? Everyone rushes to avoid Substance A, manufacturers remove it from their products, and its name becomes mud. Then a few years later comes the headline: Researchers at such and such university show that Substance A doesn’t cause cancer.

Why the flip flop? Because the first study, the one showing that Substance A causes cancer, was an observational study. The second, the one absolving Substance A, was a double-blind, placebo-controlled study.

It’s axiomatic in the research community that observational studies can lead only to the development of hypotheses. In our example above, the observational study led to the hypothesis that Substance A causes cancer. But when that hypothesis was tested, it was found wanting.

The authors of these observational studies and the journals that publish them love to issue press releases implying that there is causation when they know better. And the press loves to pick up on these releases and publish them as fact.

Also, guess who wrote an article in the New York Times explaining the problems associated with observational studies... none other than Gary Taubes!

The catch with observational studies like the Nurses’ Health Study, no matter how well designed and how many tens of thousands of subjects they might include, is that they have a fundamental limitation. They can distinguish associations between two events — that women who take H.R.T. (Hormone Replacement Therapy) have less heart disease, for instance, than women who don’t. But they cannot inherently determine causation — the conclusion that one event causes the other; that H.R.T. protects against heart disease. As a result, observational studies can only provide what researchers call hypothesis-generating evidence — what a defense attorney would call circumstantial evidence.

Testing these hypotheses in any definitive way requires a randomized-controlled trial — an experiment, not an observational study — and these clinical trials typically provide the flop to the flip-flop rhythm of medical wisdom. Until August 1998, the faith that H.R.T. prevented heart disease was based primarily on observational evidence, from the Nurses’ Health Study most prominently. Since then, the conventional wisdom has been based on clinical trials — first HERS, which tested H.R.T. against a placebo in 2,700 women with heart disease, and then the Women’s Health Initiative, which tested the therapy against a placebo in 16,500 healthy women. When the Women’s Health Initiative concluded in 2002 that H.R.T. caused far more harm than good, the lesson to be learned, wrote Sackett in The Canadian Medical Association Journal, was about the “disastrous inadequacy of lesser evidence” for shaping medical and public-health policy. The contentious wisdom circa mid-2007 — that estrogen benefits women who begin taking it around the time of menopause but not women who begin substantially later — is an attempt to reconcile the discordance between the observational studies and the experimental ones. And it may be right. It may not. The only way to tell for sure would be to do yet another randomized trial, one that now focused exclusively on women given H.R.T. when they begin their menopause.

Dr. Eades expounds on this further by bringing up a hypthetical observational study...

Let’s say I want to look at the belt sizes of obese people and correlate them to weight. I get a couple of hundred (or a couple of thousand; the numbers make no difference in observational studies) obese volunteers. I write down the belt sizes and the weights of all my subjects. I run this data through the statistical program on my laptop, and I discover that there is a direct correlation between belt size and weight. And not only is there a correlation, but the correlation is highly statistically significant. I publish my results and issue a press release pointing out my results and implying that belt size is not just correlated with obesity, but that belt size causes obesity. The press picks up on the story and publishes it under the headline: Belt size may cause fatness. Then unwitting overweight people rush out to buy smaller belts in an effort to treat their obesity. Ridiculous as this sounds, it is no different than the observational study I reported on recently about red meat increasing the risk of death for victims of stage III colon cancer. No difference whatsoever.

You're probably asking, what do you do now that you've read the observational study implicating eggs to higher mortality? Gary Taubes offers this advice (emphasis mine)...

So how should we respond the next time we’re asked to believe that an association implies a cause and effect, that some medication or some facet of our diet or lifestyle is either killing us or making us healthier? We can fall back on several guiding principles, these skeptical epidemiologists say. One is to assume that the first report of an association is incorrect or meaningless, no matter how big that association might be. After all, it’s the first claim in any scientific endeavor that is most likely to be wrong. Only after that report is made public will the authors have the opportunity to be informed by their peers of all the many ways that they might have simply misinterpreted what they saw. The regrettable reality, of course, is that it’s this first report that is most newsworthy. So be skeptical. If the association appears consistently in study after study, population after population, but is small — in the range of tens of percent — then doubt it. For the individual, such small associations, even if real, will have only minor effects or no effect on overall health or risk of disease. They can have enormous public-health implications, but they’re also small enough to be treated with suspicion until a clinical trial demonstrates their validity.

If the association involves some aspect of human behavior, which is, of course, the case with the great majority of the epidemiology that attracts our attention, then question its validity. If taking a pill, eating a diet or living in proximity to some potentially noxious aspect of the environment is associated with a particular risk of disease, then other factors of socioeconomic status, education, medical care and the whole gamut of healthy-user effects are as well. These will make the association, for all practical purposes, impossible to interpret reliably.

The exception to this rule is unexpected harm, what Avorn calls “bolt from the blue events,” that no one, not the epidemiologists, the subjects or their physicians, could possibly have seen coming — higher rates of vaginal cancer, for example, among the children of women taking the drug DES to prevent miscarriage, or mesothelioma among workers exposed to asbestos. If the subjects are exposing themselves to a particular pill or a vitamin or eating a diet with the goal of promoting health, and, lo and behold, it has no effect or a negative effect — it’s associated with an increased risk of some disorder, rather than a decreased risk — then that’s a bad sign and worthy of our consideration, if not some anxiety. Since healthy-user effects in these cases work toward reducing the association with disease, their failure to do so implies something unexpected is at work.

All of this suggests that the best advice is to keep in mind the law of unintended consequences. The reason clinicians test drugs with randomized trials is to establish whether the hoped-for benefits are real and, if so, whether there are unforeseen side effects that may outweigh the benefits. If the implication of an epidemiologist’s study is that some drug or diet will bring us improved prosperity and health, then wonder about the unforeseen consequences. In these cases, it’s never a bad idea to remain skeptical until somebody spends the time and the money to do a randomized trial and, contrary to much of the history of the endeavor to date, fails to refute it.

[matawguro]

Re: Egg Article-What do you think?

Here's another article on the same study...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24028358/wid/11915773?GT1=31037

However, this article mentions something the other didn't...

Men who ate the most eggs also were older, fatter, ate more vegetables but less breakfast cereal, and were more likely to drink alcohol, smoke and less likely to exercise — all factors that can affect the risk of heart attack and death.

Let's see now, they smoked more, drank more alchol, exercised less, where already overweight,... it's so obvious...

EGGS ARE BAD FOR YOU!

Sheesh.

[chunk!]

Re: Egg Article-What do you think?

it doesn't surprise me - i have never found anything redeeming about eating eggs, especially since eating more than 1 per day will make a person go over their recommended limit of cholesterol.

i know this sounds like an anti-atkins sentiment but i personally feel that eggs are not to be eaten like a "free food" and yet it continues to happen. limit yourself and you'll be fine.

[Mrs_S]

Re: Egg Article-What do you think?

i definitely don't consider them free-i count 1 carb per egg. so i do take that into account. but i have to agree with most pp...i think this article is making claims a little quickly and not taking other things into consideration.

[Chicklady]

Re: Egg Article-What do you think?

it doesn't surprise me - i have never found anything redeeming about eating eggs, especially since eating more than 1 per day will make a person go over their recommended limit of cholesterol.

i know this sounds like an anti-atkins sentiment but i personally feel that eggs are not to be eaten like a "free food" and yet it continues to happen. limit yourself and you'll be fine.

your body produces at least 5 times the amount of "recommended" amount of cholesterol. Unless you don't have a properly functiong organ, the consumption of cholesterol is a moot point.


BTW, all the farms testing for cholesterol in pastured chicken eggs were about 1/3 less than factory farmed eggs.