This article is actually a chapter from my book, “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”.
Eggs are the richest unprocessed food commonly consumed. Rational thinking people might partake of this delicacy on a special occasion, such as after the annual Easter egg hunt.
Any reasonable behavior is undermined by the American Egg Board whose mission it is to make every day Easter for everybody.
The board has a $14 million annual budget to accomplish this job.
According to their website (www.enc-online.org), “The American Egg Board’s mission is to allow egg producers to fund and carry out proactive programs to increase markets for eggs, egg products and spend money for fowl products through promotion, research and education.”
As the egg industry’s promotion arm, the American Egg Board’s foremost challenge is to convince the American public that the egg is still “one of nature’s most perfect foods.”
Their efforts are working: US egg production during 2003 was 73.93 billion table eggs. This means, on average, 235 eggs a year for every single man, woman and child in the country.
The purpose of a hen’s egg is to provide all the materials necessary to develop the one cell – created by the joining of a cock’s sperm, with the hen’s ova into a complete chick with feathers, beak, legs, and tail.
This miraculous growth and development is supported by a 1-1/2 ounce package of ingredients – a hen’s egg – jam-packed with proteins, fats, cholesterol, vitamins and minerals. As a result, the hen’s egg has been called, “one of nature’s most nutritious creations.”
Indeed, an egg is the richest of all foods, and far too much of a “good thing” for people. The components of a cooked egg, even a hard-boiled egg, are absorbed through our intestines. As a result, this highly concentrated food provides too much cholesterol, fat and protein for our body to process safely. The penalties are diseases of over nutrition – heart disease, obesity, and type-2 diabetes to name only a few consequences from malnutrition due to the SAD (Standard American Diet).
Eggs are promoted as the ideal source of protein for people and often referred to as a “perfect protein.”
Eggs are indeed high in protein, but the kinds of proteins in hen’s eggs are not ideal for people. In one study, volunteer subjects were fed different foods to determine the ability of humans to utilize various protein mixtures.
Investigators found that our bodies can utilize the proteins in a mixture of eggs and potatoes 36% more efficiently than those from eggs alone.
If the protein make-up of eggs were ideal, then you couldn’t improve
upon it by adding potatoes, could you? Vegetable sources provide for all
the protein needs of people and are much safer and more ideal than from hen’s eggs.
A whole egg is 32% protein and the white of the egg is essentially 100% protein.
Infants, growing children and adults need, at most, 5% of their calories from protein. Therefore, eggs and egg products are six to twenty times more concentrated in protein than we need.
Excess protein places burdens on your body, especially on organs of metabolism, the liver and kidneys.
Animal proteins, and particularly those from egg whites, are high in troublesome, sulfur-containing amino acids, such as methionine.
Here are six examples of how excess sulfur-containing amino acids in your diet can adversely affect your health:
1) Amino acids, as the name implies, are acids; the sulfur-containing
amino acids are the strongest acids of all, because they break down into acids are the strongest acids of all, because they break down into powerful sulfuric acid. Excess dietary acid is a primary cause of bone loss leading to osteoporosis and kidney stone formation.
2) The sulfur-containing amino acid methionine is metabolized into homocysteine. This substance is a risk factor associated with heart attacks, strokes, peripheral vascular disease, venous thrombosis, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and depression.
3) Sulfur feeds cancerous tumors. (Note: the sulfur referred to in this article is not to be confused with organic sulfur crystals, which will be further explained in another chapter). Cancerous cell metabolism is dependent upon methionine being present in the diet, whereas normal cells can grow on a methionine-free diet (feeding off other sulfur containing amino acids).
4) Sulfur from sulfur-containing amino acids is known to be toxic to
the tissues of the intestine, and have deleterious effects on the human colon, even at low levels – possibly causing ulcerative colitis.
5) Restriction of methionine in the diet has been shown to prolong the life of experimental animals.
6) Halitosis, body odor, and noxious flatus – akin to the smell of rotten eggs – are direct results of the sulfur-containing amino acids that we eat.
The foul odors of sulfur gases should be a clear message that something is terribly wrong and deserves our immediate attention.
A significant amount of the $14 million collected each year by the American Egg Board is allocated for research projects, examining the effects of dietary cholesterol on serum cholesterol levels in order to prove that eating eggs will not raise your risk of dying of heart disease.
This is quite an endeavor when you consider that eggs are the most concentrated source of cholesterol in the human diet – eight times more cholesterol than beef.
Traditionally, in scientific studies on humans, eggs have been used as the source to demonstrate the adverse effects of cholesterol on our health and our heart arteries.
Dozens of papers published in scientific journals and funded by “The Egg Nutrition Center” and/or the “American Egg Board,” downplay the hazards of eating eggs.
So how do they demonstrate that eating loads of these cholesterol-filled delicacies has little effect on blood cholesterol?
The trick is to saturate the subjects with cholesterol from other sources,
like beef, chicken, and/or fish and then add eggs to the person’s die
Once a person has consumed 400 to 800 mg of cholesterol in the day, adding more (like an egg) causes little rise because the bowel cannot absorb much more cholesterol.
Poor-quality studies, often funded by the egg industry, add to the false information they use to vindicate their products.
The actual impact of egg feeding is seen when people who eat little cholesterol are fed eggs.
When seventeen lacto-vegetarian college students, consuming 97 mg of cholesterol daily, were fed one extra-large egg daily for three weeks their “bad” LDL-cholesterol increased by 12%.
The real-life effects of eggs were recently investigated in a large population of nearly 6000 vegetarians and 5000 non-vegetarians over a period of thirteen years.
Within this group of nearly 11,000 people, those eating eggs more than six times a week had a 2.47 times greater risk of dying of heart disease than those eating less than one egg a week.
A fifty-year study of nearly 2000 middle-aged men, the Western Electric Study, found that dietary reduction and cholesterol intake of 430 mg/dl (same as 2 eggs) was associated with a 43% reduction in long-term risk of coronary heart disease, a 25% reduction of risk of death from all causes, and three years longer life expectancy.
In addition to heart disease, higher cholesterol intake is also associated with more risk of strokes, blood clots, high blood pressure and cancers of the breast, prostate, colon, lung, and brain.
Cholesterol is the most damaging to our arteries when it is present in an oxidized form, as free radicals. Eggs and egg-derived products are the main source of oxidized cholesterol in our diet.
Untainted research from high-quality studies shows that adding one egg to the daily diet of the average “healthy” person, already eating 200 mg of cholesterol from other sources, will increase their serum cholesterol by about 4%, which translates into an 8% increase in their risk of heart disease.
Two eggs daily will mean a 6% increase in cholesterol and 12% more heart disease over the next 5 to 10 years.
For young men, indulgence in two of these “Easter Bunny treats” daily, means a 30% higher risk of coronary heart disease over their lifetime.
Eggs are filled with too much protein, cholesterol, calories, fat, bacteria, and environmental chemical contamination, to be consumed with any chemical contamination, to be consumed with any frequency, with any expectation of health.
Egg protein is a common source of allergy in infants, children and adults, producing problems from hives to asthma.
Eggs are high in fat, which promotes obesity and type-2 diabetes.
Fats and cholesterol in eggs promote the formation of cholesterol gallstones
and gallbladder attacks.
Egg-borne infections caused by salmonella bacteria can give rise to cramps, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, chills, fever and/or headache and food poisoning – called salmonellosis.
Eggs are a main contributor to human exposure to dioxin and other environmental chemicals that are known to cause birth defects, neurological damage, and cancer.
Many nutritional qualities of eggs are similar to the nutritional qualities of cow’s milk, cheese, chicken, beef, and fish – foods known to cause major health problems when consumed in the typical amounts of people living in western societies.
Thirty years ago, based on the concerns of the American Heart Association, the Federal Trade Commission carried out legal action, upheld by the US Supreme Court, to compel the egg industry to desist from false and misleading advertising, claiming that eggs had no harmful effects on health.
These days, with a $12 million annual budget for product promotion, matters are even worse than before, with the egg industry now making unrestrained claims like:
“There is no need to avoid eggs on a heart-healthy diet”
“Even cholesterol-lowering diets allow moderate amounts of whole eggs”
“An egg a day may keep heart disease away”
“Eat your eggs, they’re good for you”
Unfortunately, we live in a “ lawless wild west” when it comes to consumer protection from the big food businesses.
Therefore, only you can defend yourself and your family from such profit-driven bogus claims and the harms that come with them.
The solution: dump “Humpty”!
About Hesh:
I have been doing a radio show in Honolulu since 1981 called “Health Talk”. To listen to the show please go to www.kwai1080am.com on your computer at 8am Hawaii time. FYI, 8am Hawaii time is 11am on the West coast and 2pm on the East coast. To call in, the number is (808) 524-1080.
Starting August 2nd, American Voice Radio will be picking up my streamed show and playing it all week until the next one takes place. See you on the radio!
In 2007, I was “forced” to get a masters degree in Nutrition to stop all the doctors from calling in asking what my credentials were. Besides that, they never liked it when I asked them what their credentials were that would enable them to treat an illness without drugs or surgery.
If you go to www.healthtalkhawaii.com and click on Podcasts, there are years of shows there as well as hundreds of health related articles.
I am an activist. I am vehemently opposed to GMOs, vaccines, processed foods, MSG, aspartame, fluoridation, and everything else that the “pimps” (big pHarma, Monsanto, and the large food companies), and the “hookers” (the doctors, the government agencies, the Public Health officials, and the mainstream media) thrust upon us, the “tricks”.
At 75, I am in 3 softball leagues, racewalk, do stand-up paddling, hike, swim, do weights and cardio, and teach women’s self-defense classes based upon 20 years of Wing Chun training. I have been a vegetarian since 1975 and a vegan since 1990, have no illnesses and take no meds.
After being vaccinated with the DTP vaccine as a child, I developed asthma, which plagued me until 2008 when I learned about and started taking the organic sulfur crystals. My asthma was reversed in 3 days and has not come back.
So far, 22 cases of autism that we know about have been reversed, as has cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, asthma, osteoarthritis, joint pain, gingivitis, and erectile dysfunction. The sulfur has increased sexual activity, eliminated toxins, heavy metals, radiation, and parasites. It speeds up athletic recovery time, increases blood circulation, reduces inflammation, increases resistance to the “flu”, reduces wrinkles, allergies, PMS, monthly period pain, migraines, nausea, and way more, because the oxygen that the sulfur releases floods and heals the cells in the body.
The sulfur, as proven by the University of Southampton in England, enables the body to produce vitamin B12 and the essential amino acids.
You can find out more about this on my website under Products.
My book, “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”, which has been published, can be viewed and purchased at www.asanediet.com. The book clearly explains why what you eat, for the most part, is designed to keep you in a state of declining health.
I have recently discovered an amazing super food – Zeal – that contains 42 amazing probiotics, anti-oxidents and more, all designed to build and strengthen the immune system. For more info about this please email me.
Hesh Goldstein, MSNutri
“Health Talk” Moderator, K-108 Radio
POB 240783, Honolulu, Hi 96824
(808) 258-1177
www.healthtalkhawaii.com
www.asanediet.com
[email protected]