Eating Right: The Whole Egg Theory

Any food you eat—anything that can be considered food—should be whole and intact, like the whole egg.

An egg is a perfect food. It is a rich source of nutrition that is balanced and complete. Humans have been eating eggs for at least four thousand years—since we domesticated the chicken. The demonization of eggs is a clear illustration of the way we have undermined the basic goodness of the natural whole foods that humans have been eating for thousands of years.

Instead, we’ve been told to eat egg whites only or worse still, use an industrial product like Egg Beaters.

It makes absolutely no sense to discard egg yolks—they are the nutritional powerhouse of the egg, rich in B vitamins, vitamin K, selenium, vitamin D, and protein. In fact, the ratio of amino acids in a whole egg is as close to ideal for human nutrition as any food can be.

Egg yolks are also high in nutrients that promote heart health, such as betaine, which reduces homocysteine. Too much homocysteine in the body damages blood vessel walls and is linked to increased risk for heart disease, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and cancer—as well as neural tube defects.

The Whole Egg and Healthy Arteries

Yet eggs—and the yolks in particular—have been demonized since the 1950s with the wide acceptance of an idea called the “lipid hypothesis” which states that blood levels of cholesterol are correlated with heart disease and therefore we should reduce our consumption of cholesterol in our diets. This is where the idea of “clogging up the arteries” comes from.

But in fact, this is a misrepresentation. Cholesterol does not clog arteries. On the contrary, cholesterol is an antioxidant and a repair substance that appears when arteries are damaged by some other factor. When researchers find cholesterol in damaged arteries, the underlying cause is often inflammation.

What causes inflammation? Refined carbohydrates, sugar, and an overall poor diet. Just because cholesterol shows up at the scene of inflamed and damaged arteries does not make it the culprit. Indeed, every cell wall is made of cholesterol; it is as crucial to the survival of mammals as chlorophyll is to plants.

“Why would you ever tell people to reduce their cholesterol when the backbone of every hormone that made you what you are and allows you to live day to day, is the cholesterol molecule? Every cell wall—essentially the concrete that holds cells together—is cholesterol,” said Dr. David A. McCarron, a nutrition research associate at the University of California, Davis.

We now know that there are major flaws with the lipid hypothesis. For one, not everyone with high levels of cholesterol gets heart disease and, in some instances, cholesterol appears to be protective, especially for brain health. And second, it is a well-established fact that dietary consumption of cholesterol does not affect our blood levels of cholesterol in any significant way. 

But the practice of avoiding cholesterol and fats found in natural, whole foods has backfired—since Americans began eliminating them from their diets, both obesity and rates of chronic diseases have soared. This is partly because we were told by “dietary experts” to remove cholesterol-filled foods like egg yolks and replace them with low-fat industrial versions of the natural food. In the case of eggs, we have Egg Beaters, an egg white–only product. 

You Can’t Outsmart Real Food

We like to think we can outsmart nature by separating food into its constituent parts to make it better in some way—but in fact, we undermine our own interests in doing so. And the results are often comical because once these constituents are removed from foods, they are added to other foods and sold to us under the guise of better health.

Some of the worst examples are Pepsi with added fiber and fake butter spreads with omega-3 fatty acids. But you cannot eat an extracted or synthetic element of a whole food and expect to get the same health benefit as eating the whole food itself. Vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, and all nutrients exist within the synergistic matrix of the food, and those mutually beneficial nutritional relationships cannot be replicated in a lab. 

Another example is the recommendation to consume low-fat and fat-free milk and other dairy products in place of whole-milk and whole-milk products. But low-fat and fat-free dairy are not whole foods. Perhaps that is why several recent studies have found that people who drink whole-fat milk and eat other full-fat dairy products are leaner and healthier than those who drink and eat low-fat versions. This news was reported in the press as counterintuitive. One NPR headline read, “The Full-Fat Paradox: Whole Milk May Keep Us Lean,” but there’s nothing counterintuitive at all about the nutritional superiority of eating food in its whole form.

This so-called “full-fat paradox” is likely the result of the important nutrients found in foods with naturally occurring fats. Take, for example, vitamin D. This vitamin is crucial for fat metabolism in our bodies. Vitamin D is present in many of the foods we’ve been told to avoid because of their fat and cholesterol content: egg yolks, beef liver, butter, cheese, whole milk, and cream (vitamin D is also present in fatty fish like salmon, swordfish, tuna, and sardines).

In the United States, more than 75 percent of all Americans are deficient in vitamin D, even though low-fat and fat-free milk must, by law, be fortified with vitamins A and D. What’s wrong with this picture?

Vitamin D is fat-soluble, which means it needs to come packaged in fat in order to be absorbed in our bodies. The cream in whole milk contains naturally occurring levels of A and D, which was the traditional way most of us consumed enough of these important vitamins. But ever since public health officials, doctors, and dieticians told Americans to switch to low-fat dairy, and reduce butter and cheese consumption, our collective vitamin D deficit has soared.

When we add synthetic D to non-fat or low-fat products, these added vitamins are unlikely to raise our blood levels of the vitamins because they are poorly absorbed. 

Synthetic fortification does a good job at preventing the severe deficiencies that result in diseases like rickets or goiter, but it doesn’t meet the needs of a healthy and optimally functioning body. So, while the vast majority of Americans don’t have rickets, they do have blood levels of the vitamin that are far lower than what is necessary for optimal health and chronic disease prevention. In recent years, researchers have found strong links between vitamin D deficiency and various cancers.

The Whole Egg Theory applies to all other foods and can serve as a guiding principle for figuring out what—and what not—to eat. The idea of improving natural whole foods by removing, separating, manipulating, and adding to them has corrupted our entire food supply in ways that have completely changed the definition of food. 

For more on The Whole Egg Theory and much more, see my book Formerly Known As Food.

Want to take a deeper dive with me? I’m teaching a new on-line class called The Whole Egg Theory for Parents where we focus on the latest in nutrition essentials for parents.

Dates: Tuesdays March 10, March 17,  March 24, March 31

Time: 1-2 pm Eastern, 10-11 am Pacific via Zoom

Fee: $130. Click here for more info and to register.