Over the last couple of years, a lot of people have been, misinformed about whether you should or shouldn’t be eating eggs because of the cholesterol inside in it. Let’s clear that up once and for all.
Actually before we start, did you know that if you squeeze the top and bottom of an egg really, really hard that you’ll never break it?Try is out and let me know.
The “mighty” egg is a very versatile food and I want to explain whether it should or shouldn’t be in someone’s diet, and if it is or isn’t good or bad for you. So I’m just gonna start by looking at the benefits of the egg.
A lot of clients that we’d see coming in to us here would be for weight loss. That’s the way the world is turning. More and more and people are becoming overweight so when it comes to weight loss you need to watch the amount of calories you consume. An average, medium-sized egg is about 76 calories. So the benefit here it’s a low calorie snack and because it’s high in protein (7.5g), it’ll help satiate the appetite, which means it’ll keep you feeling fuller for longer. So it’s a great idea for someone who’s on a weight management plan or maintenance plan as you will be less inclined to eat, or overeat on them because they’re that bit filling.
Almost half the protein in the egg is in the white of the egg. Remember, inside in the egg, you’ve got the yellow yolk, and the white outside it. Most, or half the protein is in the white and then obviously the other half is inside in the yolk of the egg.
What else does the Mighty egg have?
It’s very high in minerals like zinc, copper and iron. Zinc helps normal growth and development during pregnancy, as a child, and even into adolescence. But it also helps with the proper development of taste and sense of smell. So if you’re ever finding that you can’t smell foods, you can’t smell things that you should smell, chances are you could have a deficiency in zinc.
It’s also very high in vitamins as well. I could be listing these for the day. You’ve got B-6, B-12, and vitamins A, D, E, K. You’ve got loads of these vitamins. The B-6 is to help maintain good neural transmitters in the brain, it basically helps with the signals transferring between nerve cells. It’s very important for normal brain function as well.
B-12, you may not know this, cannot be made by the body. But it’s an essential part of the body, or an essential vitamin that needs to get into the body, so we have to get this from food.
The vitamin B-12 helps make your DNA, but it also helps make red blood cells in the body. If you’re deficient in vitamin B-12, not only can the body not make it, it can’t store it either. You have to get it in from outside, ideally from food. But if you’re deficient in B-12 in that you’re not getting enough from food, either, you have to get injections for it. And there’s a lot of people that we’d see have to get it because they’re deficient in it. So taking in more eggs in the diet would certainly help get all these vitamins in.
Vitamin A is to help your vision.
Vitamin D is to help the absorption of calcium, and calcium as you know is to help stave off osteoporosis, particularly in women, or the earlier stages which is osteopenia. But it also helps prevent rickets in children
Vitamin E helps with the health of your hair, skin and nails.
And Vitamin K is to help the clotting in the blood. So if you ever pricked your finger with something, if you have a normal amount of Vitamin K, it should clot up and dry up fairly quick. If you’re deficient in Vitamin K which a lot of people can be, you’ll find that it takes forever to stop the bleeding, and you nearly have to get it stitched just to stop the bleeding, or you might find that you bruise that bit easier as well. These are signs that you might be deficient in Vitamin K.
Are too many eggs bad?
So these are all really good benefits of the egg but what about the age-old argument of “should I be eating a load of eggs? Should I be splitting the egg white from the yolk?”
A lot of people are picturing eggs now and they’re picturing Rocky Balboa and sticking them all into that blender or eating them raw out of a glass. Wouldn’t be my favourite beverage.
The yolk is a fat. And this is where the misconception is about the unhealthy side of it. There is cholesterol in the yolk and cholesterol is a fat. It’s the yolk that fills you up because it’s a fat. So is it a mighty egg after all
But we now know that the cholesterol we take in in foods doesn’t have anywhere near the same effect on our blood cholesterol as the amount of saturated fat that we take in in our food. So just because a food has cholesterol in it doesn’t mean that it’s going to add to your cholesterol. It’s the saturated fat that we take into the body that gets converted into the bad cholesterol which clogs the arteries and causes heart attacks etc. So it’s not necessarily the cholesterol itself.
In fact, the cholesterol that’s inside an egg helps offset that bad cholesterol that’s been created in the body by the saturated fat. So to say that the level of cholesterol in an egg is why you shouldn’t eat it, is false. The egg is still a great food, it helps bring down that cholesterol.
So when you look at it, to be honest there’s no real bad. The only real bad thing might be that it’s messy. It’s messy if you break it. But there’s no real bad side to the egg unless you have an allergy but that would be specific to you. But generally speaking across the board, the egg is a great food.
Having eggs as apart of a Healthy weight management plan
Take two medium eggs at 76 calories each. That is 152 calories on a whole meal slice of toast which is about 90 calories, you’d be looking at about 230 calories for that snack or use it as a breakfast option which will help you fill up for longer. And again, it will keep you fuller so you’re not going to be overeating and you’re gonna be dropping calories and dropping weight.
If someone says “Oh, should I be eating three or four eggs a day?” Well if you look at your calories, this is the big number. It’s like anything. You could over-eat on broccoli for the day and have too much calories taken in. So if you take in four eggs in the day, that’s 304 calories without eating any bread with it or anything like that. So that’s driving your calories up. It’s not that the egg is bad or it’s full of fat, it’s how many of these that you’re eating. But if you were having two eggs every morning with whole meal slice of toast as your breakfast, that’s fine. And if you want to separate out the egg yolk, you can do that as well. But the yolk contains a lot of these vitamins that the body needs.
The egg indeed is mighty…
Mike
