How many eggs can adults and children eat per day: consumption rate

The benefits of egg whites for athletes

The most useful part of an egg is the white. This is a natural storehouse of amino acids. It contains valine, leucine, isoleucine. At the same time, the proportions of nutrients are ideal for gaining muscle mass, as if nature itself specially came up with this product for athletes.

Interesting fact: there is a scale for measuring the value of protein for the body. Egg white is taken as a sample. It is he who has a score of 100 points out of 100 on this scale. For comparison, milk protein received a score of 85, fish protein - 80, meat protein - 70, etc.

The benefits of chicken eggs.

3 reasons why you should include chicken eggs in your menu:

Helps curb hunger.
The high protein content perfectly fights the desire to eat something harmful.
Improves brain function.
Choline prevents the development of Alzheimer's disease and activates memory.
Prevents vision loss.
The antioxidants contained in eggs protect the eyes from UV radiation and prevent the development of cataracts.

Egg whites help build muscle mass, strengthen bones and help you shed extra pounds.

But the yolk is the cause of many discussions. After all, it contains cholesterol, which leads to cardiovascular diseases. 300 mg

This is the amount of cholesterol per day that the World Health Organization has approved as safe.
At that time, the yolk of one egg (50-60 g) contains almost 200 mg of cholesterol and about 7 grams of fat.
Therefore, if your diet is balanced, you can eat 2 whole eggs and an additional 2-3 whites per day. And by adding a vegetable salad to the dish, you can enjoy a healthy low-calorie dinner.

Can athletes eat egg yolk?

On this issue, athletes are divided into two camps: some believe that it is possible to eat yolks in moderation, while others completely abandoned the use of yolks, since each yolk contains about 4 g of fat. Science in this case is on the side of the first group of athletes. Although egg yolk is quite high in fat and cholesterol, it is also rich in nutrients and adds nutritional value to the protein.

The main benefit of yolk for athletes is that it provides them with the valuable substance choline, which plays an important role in the normal functioning of the liver. So, if you eat up to 10 eggs a day, 2 of them should be eaten along with the yolk.

The benefits and harms of eggs

Each egg yolk contains 200-250 mg of cholesterol - more than almost any other product. This substance in high concentration is a constant companion of the most terrible diseases. And yet, in some cases, you can eat dozens of eggs every day and remain a completely healthy person. What's the secret?

Everyone knows about the dangers of excess cholesterol in the blood. Indeed, it leads to disruption of lipid metabolism, accumulation of cholesterol on the walls of blood vessels and the development of atherosclerosis.

The risk of developing cardiovascular diseases (coronary heart disease) and the formation of atherosclerotic plaques increases sharply.

The consequences can be extremely severe: myocardial infarction or stroke. For the timely detection of such pathologies, it is useful to regularly conduct a blood test for the lipid profile.

But cholesterol also has many beneficial functions. In particular, it accumulates in places of vascular damage and “repairs” these damages, participates in the construction and restoration of other cells. It is also necessary for the production of steroid hormones such as testosterone.

Moreover, 80% of cholesterol is produced by the human body itself, mainly by the liver. And only the remaining 20% comes from food. Why do many doctors believe that eating large amounts of egg yolks is harmful to health?

Nutritionists and endocrinologists do not and never have had a consensus, because there are many benefits from this product:

The yolk is a source of high-quality protein, which contains many essential amino acids.
It contains a lot of vitamins A, B, D, E, K. Vitamin D is especially important; most people suffer from its deficiency.
It contains important minerals for health: selenium, iron, zinc and phosphorus.
It moderately increases testosterone levels in the body.

For men

Men who want to increase muscle mass and train anabolically must include chicken eggs in their diet. Athletes also often eat high-protein diets, so they indulge in eggs.

It is believed that eating raw chicken eggs increases libido, helps cope with stress and helps normalize erectile dysfunction.

For women

Chicken eggs also have a positive effect on the female body. Eating eggs reduces the risk of breast cancer, helps replenish iron deficiency, maintains beauty and slimness, and supports the expectant mother during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Protein is necessary for the formation of the placenta, and choline is useful for the development of the baby's brain.

What are the benefits of eggs in general?

Now let's not separate the egg into white and yolk and figure out why it is useful for humans, besides the fact that it is a valuable source of protein. In this case, we are talking about benefits for all people, not just athletes.

Vitamin A in eggs makes the skin elastic, the immune system strong, and vision sharp.
Vitamins B2, B5, B12 are important for energy metabolism and the nervous system; they also take part in the process of hematopoiesis.
Vitamin D helps absorb calcium and is important for teeth and bones. Please note that chicken eggs are one of the few foods that are a source of vitamin D.
Vitamin E from eggs is needed by the nervous, muscular and reproductive systems.
Biotin supports normal metabolism.
Choline is beneficial for the liver and supports lipid metabolism.
Without folic acid, normal fetal development during pregnancy is impossible.
Iodine, which is quite abundant in eggs, is needed for the health of the thyroid gland.
Lutein protects against age-related eye diseases.
Selenium protects against the negative effects of stress.
Phosphorus is important for bones, teeth and for normalizing metabolic processes.

What is the best way to eat eggs?

You can cook eggs in different ways - soft-boiled or hard-boiled, fried, poached, scrambled eggs or other dishes, combined with various additional ingredients. However, during heat treatment, some of the beneficial properties are lost. On the other hand, raw eggs can infect a person with salmonellosis, parasites, etc. Therefore, the optimal solution is a soft-boiled egg. It retains almost 100% of its beneficial substances, but at the same time eliminates the risk of infection.

Harm to eggs

Here's how chicken eggs can be dangerous:

Salmonellosis. Eggs can carry this disease, which affects the gastrointestinal tract. People with weakened immune systems and children are at risk of getting sick. To protect yourself from this disease, eggs should be heat treated and you should wash your hands after contact with raw eggs.
Antibiotics that are fed to chickens. The fact is that on poultry farms, chickens are kept in terrible conditions, which makes them vulnerable to disease. To prevent birds from getting sick, they are fed large amounts of antibiotics. This also affects the quality of the eggs. Eggs with elevated levels of antibiotics disrupt a person's normal microflora, making them vulnerable to disease and resistant to antibiotics if they become ill. Heat treatment destroys antibiotics in eggs.
Nitrates. Most nitrates accumulate not in plant foods, but in animal products. Poisons and toxins can enter the human body through chicken eggs. This may be dangerous for children and pregnant women.
Hormones. Sometimes hens are given female hormones to increase the number of eggs they produce. However, the amount of hormones in eggs is much lower than in milk or meat.
Allergy. Egg allergies are the most common among children. It occurs in approximately 3% of children and is the second most common after peanut allergy. Symptoms of an allergic reaction to eggs are itching, rash, vomiting, nausea, diarrhea, runny nose, dizziness. In severe cases, anaphylactic shock may occur.

To avoid trouble, eat only fresh eggs and buy them from trusted places.

How many eggs can you have per day?

Despite inflammatory headlines from CNN and other news sources about how eating eggs will increase my risk of heart disease, the new egg study basically can't prove cause and effect here because it's observational.

In the past few years, nutritional epidemiology has come under considerable criticism precisely because of such weak observational studies. Here, for example, is what Dr. John Ionaddis says (chair of the Department of Disease Prevention at Stanford University, professor of medicine and director of the Disease Prevention Research Center at Stanford University - approx. Cilantro)

about the limitations of such work: “The vast majority of studies in the field of human nutrition use non-randomized observational designs, which does not give very significant results.
This is mainly due to many epistemological problems (epistemology is a philosophical and methodological discipline that studies knowledge as such. It often acts as a synonym for epistemology. Epistemology is a philosophical discipline that deals with research, criticism and theories of knowledge - approx. Cilantro.ru)
, the most important of which are them:

difficulties in reliably determining small (or even tiny) effect sizes for nutritional risk factors and nutritional interventions
difficulties in accurately accounting for mass mixing of many nutrients, clinical outcomes, and other variables
Difficulty accurately measuring food intake
suboptimal ways of reporting research

The smallness of the effects and the difficulty of accounting for all components are virtually unsolvable problems that narrowly limit the scenarios in which non-randomized observational studies are useful.”

This egg study still has the same flaws that make it inconclusive.
The study is based on a food frequency questionnaire.
Have you ever tried to sit down and remember exactly what you ate last week. How accurately do you think you can estimate how much of something you ate? Er Archer (physiologist, obesity specialist - approx. Cilantro)

I have written a lot about the inaccuracy of such questionnaires. Here is an example of his criticism.

“Rather than measuring actual food intake, epidemiologists have collected millions of anecdotal verbal and textual memories of perceived food intake. Given that actual food consumption and reported memories of perceived consumption are not in the same ontological category, epidemiologists commit the logical fallacy of reification (the logical fallacy of treating an abstraction as if it were a real thing)

. This error was compounded when anecdotal (self-reported) data were inappropriately converted (i.e., pseudoquantitatively) into proxy estimates of nutrient and caloric intake by assigning “reference” values from databases of questionable validity and completeness. These errors were further exacerbated when statistical analyzes of diet-disease relationships were performed using pseudo-quantitative anecdotal data.

These fatal measurement, analytical, and inferential flaws were hidden when epidemiologists failed dozens of studies demonstrating that the proxy estimates they created were often physiologically implausible (i.e., meaningless) and had no verifiable quantitative relationship to participants' actual nutrient or calorie intake." .

Egg Protein Powder

Athletes call egg protein perfect, as it contains all the amino acids a person needs. This protein is incredibly useful, but it is difficult to find it on sale; few manufacturers produce this product. However, even if you find it, the price will be steep, since this is the most expensive type of protein powder.

However, there is a way out! You can use a complete protein powder that contains egg white. It is a complex of casein, whey, milk and egg proteins. It is great for professional and amateur athletes.