When the news broke recently that a new study has nutritionists again claiming eggs are unhealthy, I considered whether I needed to recant a 2016 column. There, I argued that declaring eggs and other real foods unhealthy back in the 1990s had driven people to make poorer food choices. Ditching eggs meant eating more cereal, muffins or oversized bagels with fake cream cheese.
But when I perused the results of the study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, I couldn't see any evidence that eggs are worse than other things Americans tend to eat for breakfast.
The egg study wasn't a controlled experiment but a so-called observational study, in which scientists pooled several studies on a total of 30,000 Americans. At the outset, the subjects were polled about what they ate. Then researchers followed them for an average of 17 years to see who got heart disease, and who died. Those who reported at the outset that they ate more than 1½ eggs a day were 17 percent more likely to suffer from heart disease than those who ate no eggs.