Eggs on our Minds

To mention that eggs have been in the news lately would be a laughable understatement. For approximately the past three months they have been on everybody’s mind, and even that is far from being the whole picture. For EatThis.com, Sarah Garone and Olivia Tarantino wrote:

If there’s any food fraught with a tug-of-war over its healthfulness, it’s eggs. Over the years, eggs have been viewed as everything from an example of the perfect whole food to a dreaded harbinger of heart disease.

Too many eggs can bring on an undesirable effect: too much cholesterol. The authors note that nutritional guidelines no longer mention a specific cholesterol limit, but recommend that consumption of it be “as low as possible.” On the other hand, a spectacularly large study (half a million adult Chinese subjects) revealed that “up to one egg per day actually decreased the chances of developing cardiovascular disease.”

But with more, the benefits drop off precipitously. The people of China are known for their per-capita egg consumption, and collectively they account for around 400 billion eggs per year.

A recent article from ScienceDirect.com delved into the effect on obesity of the various nutrients found in eggs. Some of them actually play a role in regulating lipid metabolism in ways that prevent obesity. Apparently, it is not even certain that the consumption of egg cholesterol increases human blood cholesterol. When it comes to diabetes risk, the jury is still out.

As for weight gain, eggs seem to suffer from a certain amount of guilt by association. People like to eat them with bacon, sausage, hash-brown potatoes, and other unwise choices. Some helpful suggestions in this area include studying up on heart-healthy cooking fats, and combining eggs with vegetables.

What is going on, anyway?

A review published at around the same time in the journal Poultry Science looked at a meta-study that had reviewed two decades of nutritional literature and found that most of the nutrients in eggs are not obesogenic but surprisingly appear to “reduce the probability of obesity via lipid metabolism regulation.”

However, there seems to be an exception among “high responders,” or individuals who are particularly prone to significant changes in their cholesterol levels because they metabolize it either more or less effectively. The body of course needs the stuff, but normally our own livers produce enough of it. There seems to be a feeling that more research in this area would be welcome.

Leaving that aside, “[E]ggs are one of the healthiest sources of protein, essential amino acids, and micronutrients beneficial to human health.” Not surprisingly, the cooking method makes a noticeable difference, with soft-boiled eggs being the safest bet.

In “9 Steps to Perfect Health,” Chris Kesser has noted that nutrients in animal products like fish, meat, poultry, dairy, and eggs are highly bioavailable, meaning that we can absorb them easily. Pasture-raised animals are known for their nutrient-dense meat, while pasture-raised hens make eggs that contain as much as 10 times more omega-3 than factory hen eggs, as well as being noticeably higher in B12, folate, vitamin A, protein, and fat-soluble antioxidants like vitamin E.

Can we agree to disagree?

The consensus seems to be that eggs are great for just about everyone, except people troubled by diabetes or cardiovascular disease. But even for folks who do not have to deal with those conditions, there is still such a thing as too many. Agreement seems to have settled on the notion that an average of one egg per day is reasonable, although they can be distributed throughout the week as multiple eggs on some days, and none on others.

Some authorities are even okay with healthy folks eating 10 eggs per week, although cholesterol-sensitive individuals need to tone it down. For those who forego the yolks, two egg whites count as the equivalent of one whole egg.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “ 5 Dangerous Side Effects of Eating Too Many Eggs, According to Science,” EatThis.com, 09/01/24
Source: “Association between egg consumption and risk of obesity: A comprehensive review: Egg Consumption and Obesity,” ScienceDirect.com, February 2025
Source: “Eggs are back on the menu: Study finds no link to obesity with moderate intake,” News-Medical.net, 12/19/24
Source: “9 Steps to Perfect Health,” Chris Kresser, undated
Image by stevepb/Pixabay

The 7th of the 9 Truths

This is Truth #7 in a series that encompasses all nine of them, as proposed several years ago by the Academy for Eating Disorders. By this point, a reader might begin to suspect that not much more is known today, than was back when “Nine Truths about Eating Disorders” first appeared.

Many of the conclusions demonstrate unchanging precepts — like the fact that two things can be true at the same time. In the words of #7’s subtitle, both genes and environment “play important roles in the development of eating disorders.”

Anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder all run in families. Which exact genes are responsible, is still a mystery. One current source says, “There is a known phenotypic link between AN, growth, and sexual maturation, yet the genetic overlap between these phenotypes remains enigmatic.” So, there we have it.

On the other hand, generalizations apply, and there is one thing we do know. Science did not need to wait for the telescope or the microscope to discover that eating disorders run in families, or to notice that the cultural environment has a lot to do with how individuals (and nations) feel about human bodies and food customs. Still, psychological pressure does not seem to cause as much distress as it would, if not affected by other factors.

Can we ever know anything?

It is interesting that most people who, according to the signs, “should” develop eating disorders, do not. To discover the reasons behind this and so many other mysteries, the authors warned, would require scientists to inspect “very large sample sizes (in the tens of thousands).” But of course, volume is only one facet of discovery. Life, as always, is multifactorial. As the 2017 authors phrased it,

Eating disorders are “complex traits,” meaning that multiple genetic and environmental factors — each of small to moderate effect — act together to increase risk. Genetic and environmental factors may not only act in an additive manner, but may co-act in other ways.

Additionally, little as was known about AN at the time, even less was known about BN and BED. Moving on to Truth #8, we will not even go into why eating disorders do not follow Mendelian transmission patterns. And besides, in many cases, a family with an afflicted child will be at a loss to identify any relative who suffered from one of the conditions. Of course, war, adoption, and other socially unstabilizing vicissitudes can break connections which might have aided logical causation assumptions.

Too much togetherness presents another research problem, called confounding. In a family, there are a lot of shared genes and a lot of shared environmental factors, and how are scientific observers supposed to separate the effects of each influence? For this and many related reasons, “Rigorous studies of gene-environment interaction in eating disorders are sparse.” But basically, Truth #8 goes like this: “Genes alone do not predict who will develop eating disorders”:

[H]undreds (or perhaps thousands) of genes act in concert and are influenced by environmental factors. An individual’s risk is a composite of the cumulative number of genetic and environmental risk and protective factors to which they are exposed.

And then, there is the whole field of epigenetics, with DNA methylation, and the modification of things we never imagined could be modified, and the need to differentiate between epigenetic changes seen in the blood and what might happen in the brain; and how to figure out prevention, which is so much preferable to spending years and billions on cures.

One more, for the road

Truth #9 is short and sweet: “Full recovery from an eating disorder is possible. Early detection and intervention are important.” The authors define physical recovery as “the resumption and maintenance of a healthy body weight and a normalization of all physical parameters affected by the eating disorder”:

[B]ehavioral recovery means the absence of eating-disorder related behaviors such as food restriction, binge eating, and purging. Psychological recovery, including the attainment of normal attitudes toward food and the body, is important yet often overlooked.

Then, it gets complicated again due, for starters, to a “lack of consensus on the exact definition”:

It has been proposed that full recovery is achieved only when patients are indistinguishable from healthy controls on all eating disorder related measures, including psychological aspects.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Science Behind the Academy for Eating Disorders’ Nine Truths About Eating Disorders,” NIH.gov, October 2017
Source: “An evolutionary perspective on the genetics of anorexia nervosa,” Nature.com, 02/19/25
Image by Prawny/Pixabay

Binge Eating — What’s the Problem, Anyway?

Why is binge-eating disorder such an easy trap to fall into? An argument could be made that this is how humans were naturally trained to eat, far back in antiquity. When hunter-gatherers roamed the earth, there was no other choice. If a large animal could be brought down, sliced up, and cooked, everybody had to gobble up as much of it as possible, right there on the spot.

There were no refrigerators, and even people who never went to college can figure out that after a while, meat goes bad and makes them sick. Gathering, or reaping fruit, vegetables, and grains worked the same way. When some fruit was in season and people found a tree full of it, what else could they do but grab as much of the bounty as possible and keep their systems stoked with it until the next lucky find appeared? When food presented itself, hungry people ate while the eating was good.

It probably should not be surprising that many humans feel the ancestral urge to fill up whenever we can. Some of us are still in the situation of being forced to eat whatever is available, because of uncertainty over when another chance will occur. But millions upon millions of us are not in dire circumstances, and do not have to gorge just in case there is nothing to eat tomorrow. So let’s look at why this habit is so destructive.

Registered dietician Elyse Resch lists seven excellent reasons why anyone embroiled in a binge-eating pattern would do well to get a clue and make the effort to stop the habit. A very valid reason is that it interferes with sleep. First, it might take longer to fall asleep, but then you might wake up feeling thirst, or the jabs of acid reflux, or the simple local discomfort of a distended belly.

The second reason is very important because a condition is created in which we cannot trust the signals sent by our own bodies via the appetite hormone ghrelin or the fullness hormone leptin.

Studies show people who frequently binge-eat have lower levels of ghrelin and have difficulty responding to hormones in general. Binge-eating on a regular basis makes it harder for your body to figure out if you’re still hungry, or satiated.

The third reason is that the postprandial surges of glucose and insulin can interfere with the body’s immune system and make us more vulnerable to colds and other infectious conditions.

Next, the American Psychological Association has determined that, as with alcohol and some drugs, a food overdose can put the brain into a state of oblivion that allows the eater to escape self-awareness. Needless to say, this happens at a time when the brain most needs to be asking, “Hey, what the heck am I doing?”

The binge eater’s goal is to induce a state of peaceful relaxed bliss, but the body knows enough to reach for homeostasis, or balance. It attempts this by producing stress hormones, which in turn speed up the heart rate and produce anxious sweat, along with unpleasant irritability, and lethargy — an emotion qualitatively different from peaceful relaxation.

After consumption of a bunch of simple carbohydrates and sugar, the pancreas leaps into red alert mode trying to compensate by producing enough insulin to cope. This is a further deterrent to the body’s preferred state of homeostasis.

A reasonably balanced meal induces the brain to release dopamine, which is fine, but after overeating becomes habitual, the brain struggles to catch up and needs more and more fat and sugar input to pump out the dopamine reward. Gradually but inevitably, overeating becomes over-overeating and over-over-overeating.

Bonus list

Also from BestHealthMag.ca, here are the warning signals that a person is consuming too much sugar. Does anything strike a familiar note?

1. An acne breakout
2. A mid-day energy slump or headache
3. Dental cavities
4. High blood pressure
5. High cholesterol
6. A post-exercise energy crash from using simple sugars for fuel
7. Clothes that used to fit are too tight
8. Depression caused by systemic inflammation
9. The body doesn’t get the message that food has been taken on board, and doesn’t “feel full.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “7 Reasons to Stop Binge-Eating,” BestHealthMag.ca, 07/16/19
Source: “9 Clear Signs You’re Eating Too Much Sugar,” BestHealthMag.ca, 01/03/17
Image by The Digital Artist/Pixabay

Monkey See, Monkey Do

In an earlier post, the question about learning came up. Does someone with an eating disorder discover the lifestyle on their own, spontaneously? Or do they absorb the concept, either covertly or openly, from an older relative, or from a peer, or from the older relative of a peer? Or read about it in a novel, or see a TV show?

Of course these questions are already archaic, because now this dangerous information is easy to pick up from social media and other internet sources. But in the old days, how might someone have stumbled onto the idea of, for example, habitual vomiting as a method of weight control?

In the close confines of the family environment, a child can hardly avoid noticing behaviors associated with eating disorders. The thing about children is, they not only notice things, but assume that what they see at home is how things are supposed to be. By and large, it is helpful to society for children to make this assumption. Babies are born fully prepared to look at and imitate the older humans in their environment who take care of them. Parents, older siblings, and other relatives are expected to be role models, who demonstrate to babies how to form themselves into people.

Children have eyes and ears

In the past, a typical one-family home or apartment would only have one bathroom. What on earth was Aunt Cindy doing, spending so much time in there? How many moms spent extra moments in the basement, next to the wringer washing machine, throwing up into the utility sink?

What other behaviors could be discovered or learned? How many teenage girls have appreciated the convenience of making unwanted food disappear into the mouth of the family dog? And if kids don’t pick up eating disorder behaviors from grownups, how do those notions originate? For instance, is throwing up after meals, like masturbation, a behavior that any child can eventually discover on their own, without witnessing a demonstration?

A bit of history

Bulimia nervosa has been described as “insatiable waves of overeating followed by compensatory methods,” driven by the irresistible urge to overeat that is in constant conflict with the fear of obesity. Once bulimia was formally introduced into the medical literature, many more cases were identified and diagnosed, as might be expected. In successive editions of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, as well as other literature, definitions were characterized according to the frequency with which patients employed compensatory behaviors. This fine-tuning allowed cases to be sorted into the categories of mild, moderate, and extreme.

It appears that bulimia usually kicks in at the age of 16 or 17, and the author mentions the unexpected detail that “the rates are highest among the Hispanic/Latino population, second highest among African-Americans and lowest in non-Latin whites.” (Anorexia, on the other hand, is most prevalent among non-Latin whites.) Elena Bowie writes,

Studies have found that eating disorders are inheritable, in addition to several other parental factors that can influence the susceptibility of developing an eating disorder, like parental mental illness or parents with negative views of weight…

To diagnose bulimia may be difficult because patients “are likely to hide their symptoms and physical signs are usually absent.” Often, the evidence is provided by parents or other people in a position to notice changes in behavior. Some of them notice the signs because they have had personal experience with an eating disorder, and have overcome the urge to make it a lifestyle. The author cautions,

The most important thing to take note of is that recovery from Bulimia is not a one size fits all approach and requires careful planning of the physical, psychological, and social needs to create the best possible chance for recovery.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “History of Bulimia nervosa,” Emory.edu, 04/01/21
Image by Shutterbug75