RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Consuming one egg a day can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, heart attacks, and stroke, concludes new and controversial research.
According to a study conducted with more than 400,000 adults in China participating and published in the online magazine Heart, people who consume eggs daily have an 18% lower risk of dying from cardiovascular problems – such as heart attacks and strokes – than those who do not.
Controversy
Until recently it was believed that eating eggs every day could be bad for your health.
According to CNN, the study’s co-author and associate professor at the School of Public Health in Peking University, Canqing Yu, explained that “although eggs have high-quality proteins and other nutritional elements good for health, they also have high amounts of cholesterol, which can be harmful.
“However, existing studies on the association between eggs and cardiovascular disease are controversial due to the small sample size and limited information. This is because previous studies have provided only limited evidence from the Chinese population that has large differences in eating habits, lifestyle behaviors, and disease patterns,” said Yu. For this and other reasons, he and his colleagues decided to investigate the relationship between eating eggs and cardiovascular disease.
The research
Scientists based their findings on data from an ongoing study of half a million adults from ten regions of China. Just over 13 percent of these adults, aged 30 to 79, said they ate about one egg a day, while just over 9 percent reported never or very rarely ate eggs.
The team studied this group for nearly nine years and focused on major heart problems. Among them were heart attacks and stroked. In this period, 9,985 people died of cardiovascular disease and almost 84,000 others were diagnosed with heart disease.
After analyzing these numbers, the researchers found that eating about one egg a day is related to a lower risk of heart disease compared to not ingesting eggs.