 If you haven't noticed in the news lately that eggs are no longer good for you, I wouldn't believe you, considering how many articles have been published over the past few days. CNN, Fox, USA Today, CBS, Daily Mail, New York Times, Science Daily, Walshy Journal, Today, AP News, Gizmodo, Time, WebMD, NPR, WTOP, and I'm sure I missed at least another dozen. Now, all of these articles were based on a study published several days ago. By a student, I might add, with no peer reviewers outside of a specific medical school for the most part. But before we go into that, why wouldn't they want us to eat eggs? Definitely profit, and possibly the nutritional properties of eggs. The profit margin on grains are substantially higher than eggs. The percent farm share for eggs is about 54%, whereas the marketing bill share is 46%. Cereals and bakery products have an 8% farm share and 92% marketing bill share. This simply means that there are so many more businesses invested in grain sales from a profit perspective that when we consume eggs instead of grains, they are losing a lot of money. Do they really want us not consuming eggs because they're concerned about cholesterol giving us heart attacks? Well, I find that incredibly unlikely considering the profit of medicine, statins, getting people sick, and if people consume vitamins, they're not going to be so sick. Eggs are incredibly good for you. They have all the vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids that are essential to the body. Truly a super food. And eggs are one of the only foods that contain these nutrients that people consume on a daily basis because of the fear oriented around other animal products. If you guys want to know more about the health benefits of eggs, definitely check out my video that I'm going to link at the end. Onto the study, Associations of Dietary Cholesterol or A Consumption with Incident Cardiovascular Disease and Mortality, published by Victor Zhang, a PhD student at University of Washington. So I started googling the peer reviewers associated with the study and Linda von Horn came up as another peer reviewer on a study on Seventh Day Adventist Adolescence. Now the Seventh Day Adventist Church has a religious belief in a vegetarian diet and I thought this was just a coincidence because there are plenty of studies with Seventh Day Adventists. But I actually googled the name of the medical school and on a map I noticed there were quite a few Seventh Day Adventist Churches in the area. But this didn't seem irregular because most cities do have Seventh Day Adventist Churches, although not nearly that much. But then I looked even further into the studies Linda von Horn was associated with and a lot of them were from the American Heart Association. One of the founders in the American Heart Association was Dr. Paul Dudley White who was a Seventh Day Adventist. Winston J. Craig, another Adventist who has reviewed papers for the American Dietetics Association, mission has been quoted to prepare dietetic and nutrition professionals for service to their church, society and the world and to influence the community at large to affirm the Seventh Day Adventist lifestyle, including the vegetarian diet. Well with that out of the way, it's safe to say the study shouldn't even be looked at but let's see what they actually did here. The main claim is that for every egg consumed or amount of cholesterol in the diet the risk for cardiovascular disease goes up by approximately 6%. But this was gauged by a relative risk of 1.06 which means 6%. The issue with this is relative risk is not absolute risk. Because if relative risk was absolute risk then technically anyone who consumes a certain amount of cholesterol is going to die of a heart attack. You might notice the word adjusted a lot in this study. That is accounting for confounding factors as well as the method they used in this study. The method they used in this study wasn't actually based on egg consumption. What they did was they took 6 large cohort studies of hundreds of thousands of people. They plugged the data into some sort of algorithm and they used that algorithm to try to figure out how much cholesterol was in the person's diet, how many eggs were in the person's diet and then they adjusted for these confounding factors such as smoking, age, they probably didn't account for other lifestyle confounding factors in this algorithm. Now there are dozens of variables that they can account for and they can choose which ones they want to, which can drastically alter the results. If you change one variable that you're plugging into your algorithm that will make the difference between you finding a positive and a negative association. This is why relative risk in the context of epidemiological studies is garbage. The relative risk of cigarette smoking is 70, 80, 90, 100. It's a 10,000% association with lung cancer and cigarettes. Egg consumption, 6%, if you actually understood science, this is a joke. I could put this in my stand up routine if I could actually make it entertaining. So here is a chart from a study on cancer rates on food ingredients. Each of these dots represents a relative risk association for cancer rates and every single food on here has a negative and positive correlation with cancer ranging from 0.5 to 2. The issue stems with the ability to remove whichever variables don't fall in line with what you believe in. If any single individual food can have a relative risk of 0.5 to 2.0 in the context of cancer and most epidemiological studies on nutrition fall in a range of 0.8 to 1.2, that says something pretty significant about the studies these people are actually using to make health decisions. Fortunately for Frankie Boy, in the limitations of this study, they essentially debunked themselves. The first limitation is measurement error in self-reported dietary data and it relied on a single measurement of egg and cholesterol consumption. This is something that is already ruining the whole study because the size of an egg depending on where you're located, depending on what eggs you purchase is so different and the size of the protein that you consume based on your depth perception that you're reporting to this study is also an error and that error is way more than 6%. The next issue is exposure misclassification. What they did was they applied an average of egg and cholesterol consumption to every single person involved in the study, but this isn't true at all. It's like going to a beach and saying that everyone is in the ocean because you drained half the ocean out, it literally doesn't make any sense. Heterogeneities, the next issue, is variance in data collection methods and as you can imagine the more diverse the data, the harder it is for the algorithm or any person to analyze the data and draw conclusion from it. If you have 10 people conduct an interview, you're going to have 10 people do an interview in 10 different ways. Collustral confounding was likely, which means they didn't account for certain lifestyle factors such as sedentary activity that could easily have changed that relative risk substantially. They also didn't have detailed cause specific mortality. This means that they're just blanketing all the cardiovascular events from stroke to heart disease, whatever it may be, to cholesterol consumption. This is not good science considering there are so many different metabolic processes in the body involved in some of these other cardiovascular events that have nothing to do with cholesterol. Different nutrition and food environments can debunk this study on its own. A standard American diet mixes fat and carbohydrates, which is not good for metabolism. It causes lots of oxidative stress through reactive oxygen species. This is because the body is running on a glucose-driven metabolism and fats are not getting metabolized. That results in more free fatty acids in the bloodstream. As you can imagine, more free fatty acids in the bloodstream make more fats prone to oxidation. The context, guys, is always standard American diet bad. Nothing else really matters if you're on a standard American diet. You have to remove the foods that are an issue first. High carbohydrate, high fat, processed food, high omega-6, oxidating, vegetable oils. And finally, the studies are observational and cannot establish causality. How much evidence do you need? The profit margins on eggs. It has nutrition that they likely don't want us to have. A student wrote the paper. There's a religious affiliation with the paper. The paper itself is telling you it's not valid. If that hasn't convinced you, this will. In 1980, China consumed 2.5 kilos of eggs per capita, just over 5 pounds. In 2005, that number increased 10-fold to over 20 kilos of eggs per year. 44 pounds of eggs! So, shouldn't they be dropping dead, right? No. If you look at cardiovascular mortality during that time period from 1990 to 2005, it went down substantially. So, if I increase my egg consumption 10-fold and cardiovascular disease risk goes down, guys, these are simple statistics. Egg consumption per capita and cardiovascular disease mortality. Answer this question very, very simply and easily. There are even studies that demonstrate each 10 milligram increase in total cholesterol is associated with a 4% decreased risk of in-hospital mortality. This is wacko-dacko-cracko stuff, guys. I don't know. I really don't know what to do. The appeal to authority is unbelievable. And the media presence and people fear-mongering stuff is such a powerful tool. You have to fight against it. And the best way to fight against it is to call out the BS, the propaganda-type stuff that we can use. Oh, there's religious affiliation. Oh, these simple statistics, China's egg-capita consumption, these simple things that are very easy to understand are what we need to use. It was written by a student, huh? There were no peer reviewers outside of the medical school. These biases and these things that are very simple to understand that discredit the study is much easier to do than explaining why the study itself was done incorrectly. And someone that's more advanced, you can just show them the limitations of the study and explain why. Most people aren't going to be able to grasp the whole concept, but hopefully I've helped you guys do that and you guys can go enjoy your eggs. As I said earlier, definitely check out that egg video that I'm going to post here at the end. Eggs really are a super food. Thank you guys for watching. Please like, subscribe, hit the bell icon, and share the video if you can. Down below is my Patreon. That is a great way to support me as well as get personalized question support one on one. There's also my Amazon shop where I have things like my vitamin D3 supplements, things I use in my daily day to day life, nutrient dense foods like cod liver. There's also my Instagram guys, Twitter, I try to post on social media every day. If you guys do want to reach out to me for one on one consultations in regards to increasing the nutrient density in your diet and becoming the optimal version of yourself, you can reach out to me, frankatufano at gmail.com, you can reach out to me on Patreon, and you can also reach out to me on my website frank-tufano.com. You guys enjoy the rest of your week.