The Egg Limit Is Gone. Here's Who Should Still Keep One.

If you're over 50, someone has probably told you to go easy on eggs. Maybe a doctor said it, or a parent scraping the yolk into the bin.

You may still count them. Three a week, whites only, a carton of yellow liquid in the fridge.

But the number behind that rule quietly came off the page in 2016. And the story of how it got there starts with a rabbit…

The Rabbit That Ate The Yolk

In 1913, in St. Petersburg, a young Russian scientist named Nikolai Anitschkow ran a simple test. Anitschkow and a student, S. Chalatow, pulled pure cholesterol out of egg yolks.

They mixed it into sunflower oil and fed it to rabbits. Within weeks, the rabbits' blood cholesterol shot up. Fatty yellow streaks formed in their arteries, much like human heart disease.

But there was a catch.

Rabbits eat plants. Their bodies almost never meet cholesterol in food. So a flood of it swamps them. Rats and dogs fed the same way didn't react like that. Daniel Steinberg told the story in 2013 in the Journal of Lipid Research.

Still, the idea stuck. Blood cholesterol clogs arteries. And a yolk is packed with it…

How The Egg Got A Limit

In 1968, the American Heart Association told people to keep cholesterol from food under 300 milligrams a day. It also said no more than three whole eggs a week.

Then came 1977. A US Senate committee led by George McGovern put out Dietary Goals for the United States. The first one told people to eat fewer eggs. A second, that December, set a goal of about 300 milligrams a day.

That number sat in federal diet advice for decades. A large egg holds about 186 milligrams. It's all in the yolk, per the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). So one egg used up most of your day…

The Reversal

In February 2015, the scientists who advise the US government on diet made the news. Their line was short. Cholesterol, they said, is not a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.

Their report found no clear link between cholesterol in food and in the blood. The 2015 to 2020 Dietary Guidelines came out in January 2016. The 300 milligram cap was gone.

Here's the part the headlines skipped. The new advice still said to eat as little cholesterol as you can within a healthy diet. The number went, but the caution stayed.

What The Feeding Trials Show

So does an egg raise your cholesterol or not? Let me explain…

Feeding trials are the strong kind of test. People eat set diets. In 2019, Melissa Vincent's team pooled 55 of them, with 2,652 people. I could not confirm who paid for that review.

Their answer was yes, a little. More cholesterol in food meant more LDL in the blood. LDL stands for low-density lipoprotein. It's the kind that builds up in artery walls. Call it the bad cholesterol from here on.

But people don't all react the same way. A University of Connecticut team fed 42 adults, aged 50 to 80, three eggs a day for 30 days. For another 30, they ate an egg stand-in with no cholesterol. Christine Greene was first author, in 2006. The American Egg Board's nutrition arm helped fund it, along with a federal grant.

Fifteen of the 42 were what the team called hyper-responders. Their bad cholesterol climbed. But so did their good cholesterol, and the ratio held steady. The rest barely moved.

So here's the honest version. For most people, an egg nudges blood cholesterol a little. In some it pushes harder. Only a blood test tells you which group you're in.

Who Should Still Be Careful

This is where I'd slow down if you have diabetes.

Frank Hu's team was at the Harvard School of Public Health. In 1999, they tracked about 118,000 nurses and male health workers. Up to one egg a day showed no link to heart disease or stroke in healthy people. That ran in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

But in people with diabetes, the picture flipped. Take diabetic men who ate more than an egg a day. Their heart disease risk was about twice that of men eating under one a week. For diabetic women, it ran about 50 percent higher.

A 2018 trial from the University of Sydney pushed back. Nick Fuller's team gave people with type 2 diabetes or prediabetes eggs for a year. One group ate 12 a week. The other ate fewer than two. Their cholesterol, blood sugar and blood pressure came out the same. Australian Eggs gave a grant for it but played no part in the design. And it measured blood tests, not heart attacks.

In 2019, Victor Zhong's team at Northwestern University pooled six US groups. That was 29,615 adults, followed for a median of 17.5 years. Each extra 300 milligrams of food cholesterol a day was tied to a 17 percent higher risk. That's the risk of heart and blood vessel disease. Half an egg more per day came with a 6 percent higher risk.

A year later, Mahshid Dehghan's team at McMaster University looked at about 177,000 people in 50 countries. They found no link between eggs and blood fats, heart disease or death.

The Harvard, Northwestern and McMaster studies all watched what people said they ate. None of them can prove cause.

So eggs are not harmless for everyone. The evidence is kind to healthy people. There's a real asterisk for the rest…

It's The Plate, Not Just The Egg

In 2019 the American Heart Association put out an advisory in the journal Circulation. Jo Ann Carson led it. Healthy people, it said, can eat up to one whole egg a day. Older adults with normal cholesterol can go up to two.

People with high cholesterol, it added, should be careful with foods rich in it. That's most true for those with diabetes or at risk of heart failure.

And it named the real tangle. It's hard, the panel wrote, to tell the egg's effect from the sausage or bacon eaten beside it.

Those sides bring saturated fat of their own. A large egg carries about 1.6 grams of it. It also has 6.3 grams of protein, for about 72 calories.

That's why the advice now looks at the whole plate, not a count of milligrams. An egg is a whole food in the plainest sense. It's a full meal for a chick, in its own shell…

Three Things Worth Knowing At The Store

The egg spent a century carrying the blame for a rabbit's bad week. The true story is smaller, and more useful.

For most healthy people, one egg a day fits a good diet. With diabetes, the answer is still open, and your own blood test beats any headline.

So buy a dozen this week. Check the pack date, cook them with greens, and leave the bacon on the shelf.

Stay well,
The Healing Plate