 As I noted last year, the Harvard Nurses' Health study found that the daily consumption of the amount of cholesterol found in just a single egg appeared to cut a woman's life short as much as smoking 25,000 cigarettes, five cigarettes a day for 15 years. Following up on that research, a study in the journal Atherosclerosis found that just three eggs or more a week was associated with a significant increase in artery clogging, plaque buildup in people's carotid arteries going to their brain. A strong predictor of stroke, heart attack, and death. In fact, they found a similar exponential increase in arterial plaque buildup for smokers and egg eaters. Those that ate the most eggs had as much as two-thirds the risk of those that smoked the most, the equivalent of a pack-a-day habit for 40 years or more. This did not go over easy with the egg industry, as revealed in a series of internal memos about this group of researchers Retrieved through the Freedom of Information Act, the American Egg Board discussed the wisdom of making industry responses when the public knows there's a vested interest. So, the executive director of the Egg Board's Egg Nutrition Center proposed they contact some of our friends in the scientific community to have an objective, external source author the response. If you do so, he wrote to one of their friends at Yale, who will certainly compensate you. But the prominent Yale physician refused to participate in an overly antagonistic letter given his friendship with one of the co-authors of the review. If you can't find someone with credentials to counter the science, why not just make one up? How's this for a bizarre twist? An email was circulated to discredit the researchers by a doctor-doctor, MD, PhD, why not throw in an MBA while you're at it, who claimed the prestigious researchers didn't know a thing about nutrition. Only when the principal investigator of the Egg Study replied to the allegations did we learn that the doctor-doctor doesn't exist. His email was hacked. The poor guy was like, I was on vacation, I don't know what you're talking about. And apparently the culprit was never found.