An Eggcellent Example of Extreme Eating
Take Heart When It Comes to Your Heart
A recent episode of the popular fitness podcast Mindpump [1] has a Q and A segment, and the topic of protein came up, as it invariably does. One questioner asked for advice regarding reaching protein targets, and as this person is a vegetarian—not a vegan—she felt that she was under consuming protein. She also noted that she’s lactose intolerant, so she was looking for guidance as to how to increase her protein intake [2] in such a way that does not rely on protein shakes, dairy, and, obviously, meat.
The hosts asked if the caller is able and willing to eat eggs, which she said she is, so their advice was to fill that protein gap by consuming 50-60 grams of protein through eggs, which didn’t have to be consumed in one sitting but could be spread throughout the day. This recommendation is not 50-60 grams of eggs, which is about one egg by weight; this recommendation is adding this amount of protein through egg consumption. To be clear, I was wondering if I misheard the segment, so I relistened to it a few times, and yep, this is the recommendation. [3]
I’m a certified arithmetic ignoramus, but even I can handle this one. Let’s say we want to get 60 grams of protein from eggs. As each egg has about 6 grams of protein, to get to 60 grams, we’d need about 10 eggs. They’ve just recommended that someone eat almost a dozen eggs, almost an entire carton, every day.
Obviously, the woman has gone to some lengths to contact the podcast, submitting a question, and agreeing to call in live and be recorded, showing that she values the hosts’ input, and they do have some great advice to give, but this one needs some pushback.
The USDA nutrition facts for eggs [4] lists that each egg also carries 80 calories, 5 grams of fat, 1.6 of which are saturated fat, as well as 186 milligrams (mgs) of cholesterol—about 62% of the recommended daily value. Multiply each of these numbers by ten, and we get 800 calories, 50 grams of fat, 16 of which are saturated, and 1860 mgs of cholesterol.
Really, as most of the energy in whole eggs comes from fat, they are a source of fat more than anything else: 5 grams of fat = 45 calories; 6 grams of protein = 24 calories. Like nuts, these are a fat source that have some tag-along protein, which is helpful if you want to keep an eye on how to sort of passively accumulate protein, but as a primary protein source, fuhgeddaboudit.
In all likelihood, 800 calories are probably close to half of this woman’s daily energy requirements (she’s quite petite, noting her height and bodyweight earlier in the conversation). Having a one-off day where you’re getting half of your total daily calories from a single food source is not a problem; even two days is probably fine, but more than that and it’s not a great idea for a couple of reasons. One is that it is displacing other foods and the other nutrients they have, nutrients your body needs and wants. Another reason is that chronically consuming a high quantity of a particular food is how nutrient deficiencies can arise, by virtue of that long-term displacement of other foods, which is when certain conditions can pop up.
Ironically, the amount of total fat from this number of eggs wouldn’t be a concern if this is the only fat source and it’s spread throughout the day. However, adding that amount of saturated fat to any diet is not helpful, and that amount of cholesterol is inadvisable.
Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash
Heart disease is the number one cause of death globally in developed countries. What contributes to heart disease is saturated fat because the LDL particles (apo B, baby!) that package and transport the fat in the blood are what gets stuck into arterial linings, which build up over time and lead to blockages and major cardiovascular events—strokes and heart attacks.
Recommendations are to keep daily saturated fat intake to 10% of total calories [5]; on a 2,000-calorie diet, for example, which is a sort of population average, that would be about 200 calories of saturated fat, or about 22 grams, most of which is being filled just from this recommendation from eggs, and if this caller eats just about anything else, she’s going to blow right past those remaining 6 grams of saturated fat. And that’s if she eats 2,000 calories. If she eats fewer, which is likely given her body size, her target for saturated fat will be lower. She might reach it from just the eggs.
Quick aside: The American Heart Association recommends keeping saturated fat intake between 5-6% total calories. [6] On a 2,000-calorie diet, that’s 100-120 calories of saturated fat a day, or about 11-13 grams, which eating ten eggs easily passes. If this woman’s caloric requirements are about 1,600 calories, at 5-6%, that would put her between roughly 9-11 grams of saturated fat. Again, ten eggs = 16 grams of saturated fat.
Recommendations for cholesterol intake are 300 mgs a day, so 10 eggs are about six days’ worth of dietary cholesterol intake. Again, their recommendation is putting six days’ worth of cholesterol in a single day’s feedings. If you are diagnosed with heart disease, physicians will want you to keep intake under 100 mgs a day—about half of a single egg. Like saturated fat, dietary cholesterol elevates serum (blood) cholesterol, making the blood thicker, harder for the heart to pump, and also contributes to atherosclerosis. [7]
Not surprisingly, foods that are high in saturated fat are often simultaneously high in cholesterol, and the inverse is also true. So if you’re eating a meal with a good amount of fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol, you’re literally making your blood thicker and more viscous, resulting in the unrecognized medical condition as ketchup blood.
Another problem with a blanket recommendation like this is that most people don’t consume eggs by themselves, as if they’re hardboiled or poached. If anything, they’re scrambled or fried with oil, butter, or, worse, lard, which adds even more calories and saturated fat.
Such a high recommendation is, frankly, weird, in any context, and especially so, again, given that they were speaking to a vegetarian.
Another recommendation, an easier-to-stick-to and healthier one, might be to suggest some tofu. This question, after all, came from a vegetarian. A standard 3-oz serving of tofu is pretty comparable to a single egg in terms of energy, which would be 100 calories, and also has zero cholesterol, 6 grams of fat, 0.5 of which are saturated, no carbs, and 12 grams of protein.
To get to their recommendation of 50-60 grams of additional protein, this woman would have to add about 4-5 servings of tofu to her daily meal plan, which would come to 12 to 15 ounces of tofu and 400-500 calories—almost half the cals of the egg recommendation and zero the cholesterol. That’s still a lot of tofu, about one standard package, and even eating half of that is no small feat for most people though (go ahead and give it a try), but split throughout the day would probably be easy enough, and it’s miles better than eating almost a carton of eggs.
Still, eating a whole package of tofu may not a problem for you or the likes of yours truly, but would I want to do that every day? Would I want to allot close to a quarter of my energy every day to that much tofu every day? Doubtful.
And it doesn’t have to be one or another, eggs or tofu. Hey, how about an egg here or there, a serving of tofu, some seitan; get some beans in there if you can. All those together, by the way, can make a good dish, something like this:
Photo by Anh Nguyen on Unsplash
If lactose tolerance isn’t an issue, let’s ask hey, can you do a protein shake? However you like it: dairy or plant milk? Cool. Whey or plant-based protein? Go for it. Don’t forget the low-fat and nonfat Greek yogurt, and cottage cheese can help, too.
Another issue with recommending almost a carton of eggs a day is sustainability. Really, how long can anyone really do it before the thought of an egg makes them nauseated? That volume of food is also displacing other, much healthier foods, as we’ve alluded to.
This isn’t about vegetarianism or veganism or omnivorism or carnivorism. This is about eating a healthy dietary pattern, and just about any dietary pattern can be healthy or unhealthy over a long-enough period. You can gain or lose weight on any dietary pattern, but the quantity, quality, and frequency of selected foods will lean you one way or the other in terms of health, and doing that to the extremes with certain foods will push you hard and fast to one side.
Here's something that took me a long time to understand: eating for health and eating for a certain body composition are not necessarily synonymous. You can do both, for sure, but it requires a second to consider. And eating for performance is a completely different discussion as well, something that also took me a while to wrap my head around. Again, these are not all mutually exclusive, but they are not inherently the same.
Basically, with this one dietary recommendation, my dudes here have just pushed their caller onto a track with that heart disease train rolling right towards her. From one day to the next, she’s likely not doing any significant harm, but over time, even a short period like a month, may have noticeable, measurable, meaningful, and lasting effects on her cardiovascular health. And then, one day, maybe one day many years later, that train will hit her, sooner than it would have otherwise if she hadn’t been consuming so many eggs every single day.
This train, by the way, is coming for all of us, but let’s run in the opposite direction for as long as we can.
According to the CDC, almost 700,000 Americans died from heart disease in 2021; more than 600,000 have their first heart attack every year, and 1 out of every 5 heart attacks is silent. [8]
You’ll hear folks say, “Yeah, but…” for each of these points, but the fact is that the evidence is overwhelmingly directionally true, and the folks who put together these recommendations and guidelines are folks that have PhDs in these areas and have spent their professional lives and careers studying this stuff.
If you want to recommend that someone consume ten eggs a day, which is anyone’s right if they choose, it might also be good to say, “Hey, by the way, if you do that, here are some other points you might want to consider regarding how that number of eggs every day could affect your cardiovascular health [as a consequence of that saturated fat intake].” And/or they might say, “This is what I do, but I’m willing to make this trade off…”
These guys have a huge platform, and their audience values and trusts their input, and many of their listeners will take them at their word without following up and looking into some of this information. They do have plenty of useful, practical, common-sense advice to offer regarding health and fitness. And as a classroom teacher, I’m no stranger to saying something on the spot and questioning how I communicated it after the fact, and maybe this was one of those instances.
Still, what kills me is that some kid somewhere who idolizes this content creator or that influencer is going to hear a recommendation like this and just take them at their word. They won’t hear another side of it, which might make them consider adjusting their diet in a different direction; they may not be willing to make the same tradeoffs that the influencers do. It might be years before they examine these subjects in more detail, if at all ever again.
I, for one, was definitely one of those kids.
Remember, no extremes, and a central pillar of healthy eating is variety.
So, please, don’t place all your proverbial eggs in that singular basket, and certainly don’t eat all the eggs.
“2294: How Protein Intake Can Make or Break Your Progress in the Gym, Why F45 May be Slowing Your Gains, the Importance of Sleep for Building Muscle & More (Listener Live Coaching).” Mind Pump Media. 16 March 2024. mindpumppodcast.com
There’s plenty more to say about protein, such as daily intake targets, but we’ll defer those conversations to other articles.
This portion of the conversation begins around 1:09:00.
FoodData Central (usda.gov)
U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020-2025. 9th Edition. December 2020. Available at DietaryGuidelines.gov: https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/resources/2020-2025-dietary-guidelines-online-materials
Saturated Fat - Professional Heart Daily | American Heart Association
Grundy SM. “Does Dietary Cholesterol Matter?” Current Atherosclerosis Reports. 2016 Nov; 18(11):68. doi: 10.1007/s11883-016-0615-0. PMID: 27739004: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27739004/
Heart Disease Facts | cdc.gov
