Agreed that seems like a potential conflict that should be scrutinized, but it highlights a real problem in health research. Who else would fund a 40,000 participant 15 year study about egg consumption and Alzheimer’s? How many studies are not conducted because no one is interested in funding them?
The paper is an analysis performed on a larger dataset. No one created or ran a 15 year study on egg consumption. Someone ran a 15 year study that included dietary survey questions that happened to include eggs, and then someone other group mined the dataset for this analysis.
None of the billionaires got that way by throwing money at egg studies. Bold to think they'd just start doing it now.
Insurance companies don't fund medical research AFAIK? But if they did, it would be coming out of your premiums.
The US Government is not a reliable source of research or funding these days.
Universities are generally looking for subjects that will further their prestige and expand the frontiers as they understand them. This isn't that. And they, too, have funding issues, tracing in many ways right back to the government.
Quality of this study aside, and n of 1 here, my own state of mind, clarity of thought, and sleep are all noticeably better when I'm eating 2 or 3 eggs a day, 3 to 5 days a week. (I might go 7 days, but an independent value placed on dietary variety prevents that--perhaps foolishly when I notice what I'm eating on off days instead of the eggs.)
Regardless, this whole eggs-are-evil thing has probably done more to harm the health of Westerners than any other dietary advice, with the possible exception of the fat-is-evil nonsense.
Do you think the eggs are causing the better sleep, or are you more likely to have the energy to make eggs in the morning if you’d had a good night’s sleep?
It seems the eggs improve the sleep, because after poor sleep, eggs the following day seem to have an effect on breaking the poor-sleep doom loop (which is: poor sleep elevates cortisol, adrenaline, heart rate, junk-food cravings, and the need for caffeine--all of which contribute to another night of bad sleep). Not sure if it's the choline, which eggs have a lot of, or the egg-generated satiety that helps prevent eating too much. I think it may be the choline because when I'm otherwise eating high-choline foods such as red meat, my sleep is also better.
Sugar ( in all its names and molecular forms ) is evil, because of the vast amount it is in processed food products. Eggs and fat not so much. But they would be if that is the next ‘cheap molecule to make processed food cheap’.
Given that a great number of Westerns are overweight, it's probably appropriate for them to act as though "fat is evil" due to calorie density. Plus: saturated fat should be avoided; this is another thing Westerners are likely to be getting too much of.
Except that three saturated-fat-laden strips of bacon for breakfast prevents the need for lunch, leaving my daily caloric intake lower than if I had eaten a bagel for breakfast and been hungry at lunch. The longer period between meals--snack-free--afforded by the bacon also means that post-meal insulin (the energy-storing hormone) has a chance to drop off, leaving glucagon (the energy-burning hormone) a path for liberating stored energy to power physical and mental activity.
I stopped the mid-morning bacon a few years ago and have put on 15 pounds since. A lot of variables, blah, blah, blah. I know. But still. No bacon, fewer eggs, and 15 pounds heavier, despite 10 - 20 more miles per week of running. Just sayin'.
Joking aside, (and I speak as someone who has lost 2 close members of my family to dementia), as soon as people start to experience any form of dementia, there is a sort of coping mechanism that kicks in where they stop doing “complex” things as much as they used to, because there is a huge amount of anxiety that is caused by losing short-term memory (you are constantly thrown into situations where you can’t make sense of what’s going on). So my mother-in-law for example, stopped cooking for herself long before some of the other symptoms really became apparent. She told everyone she was “bored of it”, and when cooking for a larger group she wolud constantly check and recheck the recipe. At the time it drove me crazy but then later when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s it all started to make sense.
I know you’re joking, but possible causal path here:
People with Alzheimer’s lose ability to use stove -> eat simpler less involved breakfasts -> eats less eggs
Works surprisingly good indeed. Just get a bowl, stir some eggs, add seasonings of choice and pop it in. Be sure to stop the microwave on time, because the mixture expands a lot.
You can, but people don't as a general rule. It's a traditional food prepared traditionally. And importantly, another thing early Alzheimers cases don't do is learn new cooking hacks.
Adventists are okay with meat as long as it’s kosher generally.
I think the bigger factor is that they’re teetotalers.
My data points, though: two of my vegetarian teetotaling Adventist family members died of Alzheimer’s. The lifestyle is clearly not a cheat code for defeating dementia.
I grew up SDA. We ate eggs. Meat (beef, chicken, fish with scale and fins) was not forbidden but it was looked down upon. Potlucks were the worst since i was (am) a picky eater. No meat in sight. Mostly grey lumps in white gravy-ish sauce. I would survive on shells and cheese, mashed potatoes, and fruit salad.
It's possible we were just bad SDAs though. I've met some hardcore SDAs. I imagine how I felt about them was how "regular" Christians felt about me.
Sorry, this is way more information than you asked for...
They do. These days generally the main prohibition is pig derived products, but plenty of SDAs still choose to be vegetarian. I'm not an SDA, but my daughter is.
A core part of the scientific method is that you attempt to isolate a single variable at a time. If anything, all this suggests is that this was a better diet-controlled sample population for measuring the correlation of eggs and Alzheimer's than the general public. That said, the methodology of this study does not allow for inferring a relationship between Alzheimer's and meat consumption in either direction.
There could be an interaction with the diet though. For example, what if the nutrient in eggs that prevents Alzheimer's is something that also occurs in meat?
Also, it seems likely that among this population many of those who don't or rarely consume eggs are vegan or almost vegan, so it might be more accurate to say that veganism is correlated with Alzheimer's.
To the egg lovers among us: what percentage of the mass you ingest over the lifetime do you think eggs total up to? Shall we say 5%?
Suppose the remaining 95% is healthy vegetables, or a ludicrous amount of junk food. Do you think you can attribute any effect to eggs over the course of a lifetime?
Of course not. However that is how dietary research works, and together with the blatant conflict of interest in this case, still call themselves a science whose findings get readily published in social media and newspapers.
If I were king of this place, the first thing I would do would be to ban papers on nutrition, and nothing of value would be lost.
Not necessarily. Looking before crossing the street is inversely correlated with getting hit by a truck. Getting trucked is inversely correlated with getting mauled by a lion (most places with wild lions are light on road traffic). Doesn't mean that looking both ways will increase your odds of becoming lion chow though.
alzheimers must be a byproduct of some process the body uses to fight cancer. thank you so much for sharing this article, it is the most interesting physiological discovery I've heard in a long time. next steps we need to identify whether this hypothetical anti cancer mechanism is selective or constantly active. the plaques were a dead end but not a dead end!!!
> In addition, to evaluate potential bias because of unmeasured systematic differences between consumers and nonconsumers, we conducted a sensitivity analysis excluding vegans. Vegans comprised a substantial portion of the zero egg consumption group, which could disproportionately influence this group, and they often differ in other lifestyle or health-related characteristics.
So they eliminated vegans from the sensitivity analysis despite them comprising a substantial portion of the no-egg group.
If the analysis doesn’t hold with vegans included, it’s probably saying a lot about dairy rather than eggs.
They said it held up with and without vegans, getting the same result.
> Results from the sensitivity analysis excluding vegans remained very consistent with the primary findings (Table 3). The HR for consuming eggs 5 or more times/wk, compared with never/rare consumption, was 0.73 (0.60, 0.89).
I’m copying this comment from discussion two months ago
> Caveat:
> > Funding [...] The analyses in this study were supported by an investigator-initiated grant from the American Egg Board. [...]
Agreed that seems like a potential conflict that should be scrutinized, but it highlights a real problem in health research. Who else would fund a 40,000 participant 15 year study about egg consumption and Alzheimer’s? How many studies are not conducted because no one is interested in funding them?
The paper is an analysis performed on a larger dataset. No one created or ran a 15 year study on egg consumption. Someone ran a 15 year study that included dietary survey questions that happened to include eggs, and then someone other group mined the dataset for this analysis.
This particular study (AHS-2) was initially funded by the NIH (and has continued with NIH and mixed funding): https://publichealth.llu.edu/adventist-health-studies/videos...
> Who else would fund a 40,000 participant 15 year study about egg consumption and Alzheimer’s?
Your government. Health insurances. A university. Any of the thousands of billionaires on this planet.
None of the billionaires got that way by throwing money at egg studies. Bold to think they'd just start doing it now.
Insurance companies don't fund medical research AFAIK? But if they did, it would be coming out of your premiums.
The US Government is not a reliable source of research or funding these days.
Universities are generally looking for subjects that will further their prestige and expand the frontiers as they understand them. This isn't that. And they, too, have funding issues, tracing in many ways right back to the government.
GP was proposing better ways to fund research than having the industry sponsor the research that better fits their agenda. That was all.
The egg billionaires did.
Big Egg
Also, buried in the article:
> Substituting eggs for nuts/seeds or legumes in the diet was associated with a similarly reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
So one of those egg council creeps got to you too huh?
Aw, you've got it all wrong bwat49. It's not like that!
(Sonic voice) Foiled your plans again, Eggman!
Quality of this study aside, and n of 1 here, my own state of mind, clarity of thought, and sleep are all noticeably better when I'm eating 2 or 3 eggs a day, 3 to 5 days a week. (I might go 7 days, but an independent value placed on dietary variety prevents that--perhaps foolishly when I notice what I'm eating on off days instead of the eggs.)
Regardless, this whole eggs-are-evil thing has probably done more to harm the health of Westerners than any other dietary advice, with the possible exception of the fat-is-evil nonsense.
Do you think the eggs are causing the better sleep, or are you more likely to have the energy to make eggs in the morning if you’d had a good night’s sleep?
It seems the eggs improve the sleep, because after poor sleep, eggs the following day seem to have an effect on breaking the poor-sleep doom loop (which is: poor sleep elevates cortisol, adrenaline, heart rate, junk-food cravings, and the need for caffeine--all of which contribute to another night of bad sleep). Not sure if it's the choline, which eggs have a lot of, or the egg-generated satiety that helps prevent eating too much. I think it may be the choline because when I'm otherwise eating high-choline foods such as red meat, my sleep is also better.
Sugar ( in all its names and molecular forms ) is evil, because of the vast amount it is in processed food products. Eggs and fat not so much. But they would be if that is the next ‘cheap molecule to make processed food cheap’.
Given that a great number of Westerns are overweight, it's probably appropriate for them to act as though "fat is evil" due to calorie density. Plus: saturated fat should be avoided; this is another thing Westerners are likely to be getting too much of.
Except that three saturated-fat-laden strips of bacon for breakfast prevents the need for lunch, leaving my daily caloric intake lower than if I had eaten a bagel for breakfast and been hungry at lunch. The longer period between meals--snack-free--afforded by the bacon also means that post-meal insulin (the energy-storing hormone) has a chance to drop off, leaving glucagon (the energy-burning hormone) a path for liberating stored energy to power physical and mental activity.
Bacon - the ultimate diet food.
I stopped the mid-morning bacon a few years ago and have put on 15 pounds since. A lot of variables, blah, blah, blah. I know. But still. No bacon, fewer eggs, and 15 pounds heavier, despite 10 - 20 more miles per week of running. Just sayin'.
> Except that three saturated-fat-laden strips of bacon for breakfast prevents the need for lunch
Said no overweight American ever.
Why would having alzheimer's reduce people's desire to eat eggs?
They would forget where they put them.
Joking aside, (and I speak as someone who has lost 2 close members of my family to dementia), as soon as people start to experience any form of dementia, there is a sort of coping mechanism that kicks in where they stop doing “complex” things as much as they used to, because there is a huge amount of anxiety that is caused by losing short-term memory (you are constantly thrown into situations where you can’t make sense of what’s going on). So my mother-in-law for example, stopped cooking for herself long before some of the other symptoms really became apparent. She told everyone she was “bored of it”, and when cooking for a larger group she wolud constantly check and recheck the recipe. At the time it drove me crazy but then later when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s it all started to make sense.
I know you’re joking, but possible causal path here: People with Alzheimer’s lose ability to use stove -> eat simpler less involved breakfasts -> eats less eggs
You can make eggs in a microwave (critically so long as you don't do it in the shell)
Works surprisingly good indeed. Just get a bowl, stir some eggs, add seasonings of choice and pop it in. Be sure to stop the microwave on time, because the mixture expands a lot.
You can, but people don't as a general rule. It's a traditional food prepared traditionally. And importantly, another thing early Alzheimers cases don't do is learn new cooking hacks.
Some previous discussion 2 months ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48038873
Since the study was done on Seventh Day Adventists, it's worth noting that they are all vegetarian, so no meat based protein options here...
Adventists are okay with meat as long as it’s kosher generally.
I think the bigger factor is that they’re teetotalers.
My data points, though: two of my vegetarian teetotaling Adventist family members died of Alzheimer’s. The lifestyle is clearly not a cheat code for defeating dementia.
I guess I gotta be the one to ask -- so do you recall if they ate eggs ?
I grew up SDA. We ate eggs. Meat (beef, chicken, fish with scale and fins) was not forbidden but it was looked down upon. Potlucks were the worst since i was (am) a picky eater. No meat in sight. Mostly grey lumps in white gravy-ish sauce. I would survive on shells and cheese, mashed potatoes, and fruit salad.
It's possible we were just bad SDAs though. I've met some hardcore SDAs. I imagine how I felt about them was how "regular" Christians felt about me.
Sorry, this is way more information than you asked for...
They do. These days generally the main prohibition is pig derived products, but plenty of SDAs still choose to be vegetarian. I'm not an SDA, but my daughter is.
About half of the study participants were non-vegetarian, IIUC. I wonder if they found any correlation after slicing by vegetarianism?
A core part of the scientific method is that you attempt to isolate a single variable at a time. If anything, all this suggests is that this was a better diet-controlled sample population for measuring the correlation of eggs and Alzheimer's than the general public. That said, the methodology of this study does not allow for inferring a relationship between Alzheimer's and meat consumption in either direction.
It is very difficult to do that in biological systems where doing A in isolation can have the opposite effect of doing A while also doing B.
There could be an interaction with the diet though. For example, what if the nutrient in eggs that prevents Alzheimer's is something that also occurs in meat?
Also, it seems likely that among this population many of those who don't or rarely consume eggs are vegan or almost vegan, so it might be more accurate to say that veganism is correlated with Alzheimer's.
1. They ran a sensitivity analysis that removed vegans yet still got the same result, so the egg gradient is still there among non-vegans.
2. They modeled swapping eggs for nuts/seeds/legumes and saw the same risk reduction. (Table 4)
>2. They modeled swapping eggs for nuts/seeds/legumes and saw the same risk reduction. (Table 4)
I think the table isnt clear, but I think the claim for 2 is that nuts(ect) did not show the same reduction - the egg finding held up.
> Substituting eggs for nuts/seeds or legumes in the diet was associated with a similarly reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
eggs are a highly concentrated natural source of choline. meat does contain choline but nowhere near as much as eggs.
drawing the connection between cholinergic activity and alzheimers is left as an exercise for the unaware reader.
To the egg lovers among us: what percentage of the mass you ingest over the lifetime do you think eggs total up to? Shall we say 5%?
Suppose the remaining 95% is healthy vegetables, or a ludicrous amount of junk food. Do you think you can attribute any effect to eggs over the course of a lifetime?
Of course not. However that is how dietary research works, and together with the blatant conflict of interest in this case, still call themselves a science whose findings get readily published in social media and newspapers.
If I were king of this place, the first thing I would do would be to ban papers on nutrition, and nothing of value would be lost.
I tried to look, but the google captcha wouldn't let me, finally gave up trying.
Cancer is also inversely correlated with alzheimer's.
Phrased another way, egg consumption is correlated with cancer.
Not necessarily. Looking before crossing the street is inversely correlated with getting hit by a truck. Getting trucked is inversely correlated with getting mauled by a lion (most places with wild lions are light on road traffic). Doesn't mean that looking both ways will increase your odds of becoming lion chow though.
[dead]
I'm not sure what this strawman is going on about, but the cancer-alzheimer's inverse correlation is a well known phenomenon
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41514-026-00442-1
alzheimers must be a byproduct of some process the body uses to fight cancer. thank you so much for sharing this article, it is the most interesting physiological discovery I've heard in a long time. next steps we need to identify whether this hypothetical anti cancer mechanism is selective or constantly active. the plaques were a dead end but not a dead end!!!
> In addition, to evaluate potential bias because of unmeasured systematic differences between consumers and nonconsumers, we conducted a sensitivity analysis excluding vegans. Vegans comprised a substantial portion of the zero egg consumption group, which could disproportionately influence this group, and they often differ in other lifestyle or health-related characteristics.
So they eliminated vegans from the sensitivity analysis despite them comprising a substantial portion of the no-egg group.
If the analysis doesn’t hold with vegans included, it’s probably saying a lot about dairy rather than eggs.
They said it held up with and without vegans, getting the same result.
> Results from the sensitivity analysis excluding vegans remained very consistent with the primary findings (Table 3). The HR for consuming eggs 5 or more times/wk, compared with never/rare consumption, was 0.73 (0.60, 0.89).