Are Eggs Good - or Bad - for You, Really?

Whether eggs are a bona fide superfood or a deliciously disguised death trap has been under debate for years. Maybe you've avoided eggs due to worries about the cholesterol they contain, or maybe they're part of your regular breakfast or snack rotation.

So, are eggs good - or bad - for you? Is there any truth to the claims that eggs are detrimental to your heart health, or are they simply a stellar source of protein ?

The Claim About Eggs

Eggs are a protein-rich food - one large egg has six grams of protein.

If you consume the whole egg, you're eating the egg yolk, which is a source of dietary cholesterol. In fact, one egg contains 186 milligrams (mg) of cholesterol.

It's been the cholesterol in whole eggs that has been the sticking point about whether eggs are a healthy food. As recently as a decade ago, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans advised that people limit themselves to consuming 300 mg per day of dietary cholesterol, max, in order to preserve heart health.

Those guidelines have since been dropped. To understand why this happened - and the course reversal - it's important to understand cholesterol in the body. Cholesterol is a waxy substance that your liver makes, and it's necessary in digestion and hormone production.

Cholesterol is also found in food, including red meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, and dairy. If your blood cholesterol level is high, you are at a higher risk of developing plaque buildup in arteries that leads to heart disease or stroke.

It's clear that high blood cholesterol is bad for you, but the research on what causes high cholesterol has evolved over the years. "Prior to around 2000, the recommendation was to limit dietary cholesterol intake, and by implication, eggs - since they are a major source of dietary cholesterol," says Alice Lichtenstein, DSc , senior scientist and the Gershoff Professor at the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. But with new research, that recommendation changed. "Based on the totality of the evidence, it was concluded that dietary cholesterol had little to do with blood cholesterol levels in most individuals," she explains.

Data indicates that the more prominent scourge here is saturated fat , which is often found in similar cholesterol-containing foods, like dairy and meat, as well as coconut and palm oil, and many baked and fried foods.

"Saturated fat, predominant in milk and meat fat, tends to raise LDL-cholesterol (bad cholesterol) levels, whereas unsaturated fat, found in most plant oils, tends to lower LDL-cholesterol," explains Lichtenstein. Some people are sensitive to dietary cholesterol, but the majority of people are not, she says. If you eat the yolk, one large egg contains 1.5 grams of saturated fat.

And the American Heart Association recommends limiting your consumption to about 13 grams of saturated fat, max, per day in a 2,000-calorie diet.

That brings us to the current dietary cholesterol recommendations, which are consistent with those from 2015–2020 Dietary Guidelines. The latter removed the limit for dietary cholesterol, though they still recommended minimizing dietary cholesterol in one's diet.

Whether eggs fit into a healthy diet for you depends on your overall eating pattern.

The Scientific Research on Eggs

Scientists have conducted a wealth of research on eggs over the decades, and there has been conflicting messaging - but modern evidence offers greater clarity. In a meta-analysis of 39 studies that looked at 2 million people, the authors found "no conclusive evidence" that eggs cause cardiovascular disease, though more studies are needed to see if moderate egg consumption might actually be heart-protective.

For healthy adults, a randomized crossover trial looked at what happens when healthy men and women are assigned to three different groups: one that authors encouraged to consume no eggs, a second that authors encouraged to eat three egg whites per day, and a third that authors encouraged to eat three whole eggs per day for four weeks, all the while keeping their regular diet and exercise routine.

The results? "What we found was that, overall, the nutrient-density - or quality of the diet - tends to increase when people eat full eggs as opposed to egg whites or an egg-free diet," says Catherine Andersen, PhD, RDN , study coauthor and associate professor in the department of nutritional sciences at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut. "That's because there are many beneficial nutrients present in the yolk. Most people think of egg yolk as containing fat and cholesterol. While that's true, the yolk also contains vitamin D , choline, and the antioxidant carotenoids lutein and zeaxanthin," she says. Lutein and zeaxanthin give the yolk its sunshiney hue. These compounds protect against oxidative stress, which cause cellular damage and are linked to disease, and are found in the eye, where they protect against eye-related diseases like age-related macular degeneration , she says.

With all that nutrition, are there times when you should skip eggs? Even if you have risk factors for heart disease, such as type 2 diabetes , it may not mean avoiding eggs is in your best interest. Preliminary research looked at the effects on LDL and "good" HDL cholesterol of eating 12 fortified eggs per week, compared with those in a non-egg group who ate fewer than two eggs per week for four months.

Those in the study had two or more cardiovascular risk factors or experienced a prior cardiovascular event. "We didn't find any differences between the group who ate fortified eggs compared to those in the non-egg supplemented diet," says study co-author Nina Nouhravesh, MD , a cardiology fellow at the Duke Clinical Research Institute in Durham, North Carolina.

Fortified eggs are those that contain more vitamins D, E, several Bs, and omega-3s than typical eggs. (These are sold under the brand name Eggland's Best , which funded the study. These particular eggs are also lower in saturated fat compared to regular eggs.) "The bottom line message with our study is that there can be some reassurance that we had this high-risk population and we didn't see any difference in these patients who ate eggs. But we need to be careful not to deduce any additional advice from a modest-sized study that focused on a very specific patient population," Dr. Nouhravesh says.

Also, more studies are needed on the effects of regular, unfortified eggs in people at high risk of cardiovascular disease.

All the same, another review on eggs and heart disease research (which was authored by researchers who receive funding from the American Egg Board) points out that one single food may not be the problem. Put differently, eggs alone won't make or break your health. Rather, it's important to look at the entirety of your diet and lifestyle habits. In the United States, egg eaters tend to have less healthy behaviors, such as smoking and consuming high-saturated-fat diets, and prior research did not adjust for these factors, the authors explain. Following a healthy dietary pattern, rather than trying to remove a single food, may be more impactful for your well-being. And don't forget that other behaviors, such as regular exercise and avoiding smoking and excessive alcohol intake are also good for your heart.

So, Are Eggs Good (or Bad) for You?

There is no current recommendation for how many eggs you should or shouldn't eat in a day or for dietary cholesterol, says Lichtenstein. That doesn't mean that there's a free-for-all on egg consumption. "There is no way of determining if a certain number of eggs are ‘safe'," she says.

What also matters is the quality of your diet in the context of eggs. Are you consuming eggs alongside bacon and sausage, which are rich in saturated fats? Or are you including eggs as a protein source in your diet alongside fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans and legumes, and plant-based oils like olive oil ?

If you have normal cholesterol levels, you can continue to consume your normal diet with eggs as is, says Lichtenstein. If you're looking to eat more eggs, you can gather some data by getting a baseline blood cholesterol test, telling your doctor about your change in diet, and then asking them to test you again (check with them for the follow-up duration they recommend) to watch for changes to your LDL levels. If those levels increased significantly, says Lichtenstein, "they will likely be advised to ramp back down. If not, they have another good affordable source of high-quality protein."

Eggs are a food that have been subjected to a push-pull of "good-and-bad-for-you" information for years. "I understand how people may not know where eggs stand in dietary recommendations. But eggs are the most bioavailable source of protein and are nutrient-dense," says Andersen. More than that, they are a cost-effective, accessible food that can promote health equity.

Consider the entirety of your current eating pattern and health behaviors (from sleep to stress management and exercise habits) and consider whether you're including eggs in a heart-healthy eating pattern, such as the Mediterranean diet . If you have questions or concerns about how your health history or risk factors might impact whether eggs are safe for you to eat, talk to your doctor and consider taking blood tests to monitor any problematic change in your cholesterol levels as you adjust your diet.

The Takeaway

Eggs are a high-quality source of protein that contains dietary cholesterol. There are no longer specific recommended limits on dietary cholesterol. If you're adding more eggs into your diet, consider getting your cholesterol tested to see how dietary changes impact your levels.

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