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I can remember my father’s standard breakfast of three eggs, coffee, toast and real butter he enjoyed just before his car-pool picked him up for the ride to Magma Copper’s mine site. (Interesting, isn’t it, these men sharing the 8 or so miles to work? Another lesson we might take from our recent past.)
Then the Food Scare happened, demonizing eggs, meat and saturated fat primarily, and promoting low-fat, high-carb and trans fats. Egg consumption dropped because of this. Diabetes and heart disease increased.
According to Dr. McNamara, of The Egg Nutrition Council: “For over 25 years eggs have been the icon for the fat, cholesterol and caloric excesses in the American diet, and the message to limit eggs to lower heart disease risk has been widely circulated. The ‘dietary cholesterol equals blood cholesterol’ view is a standard of dietary recommendations, yet few consider whether the evidence justifies such restrictions.”
Eggs provide beta-carotene, zeazanthin and lutein, which are antioxidants usually associated with colored vegetables. These nutrients are known to prevent macular degeneration, which so many suffer with these days.
They also supply B12, Folate, Vitamin A, Vitamin E, protein, and very importantly choline, which is essential for fetal brain development.
It turns out Dr. McNamara (and Grandma) was right, and he made the above statement in the year 2000! (Grandma said it in the 70’s!). In fact, the Framingham Study, which has followed the lifestyle of the residents of Framingham, Mass. since the 1940’s, found in 1992 that those who ate the most saturated fat, meat and eggs weighed the least and had significantly fewer heart problems.
Man has raised fowl for egg consumption since 3200 BCE, and you would hope common sense would have had us all laugh at these recommendations. However, the media has a bigger effect on us than we may realize. A PBS piece called “Merchants of Cool” addresses media’s influence and can be found on YouTube.
So stay cautious and keep your BS detector set on high, because the “Business” of healthcare and agriculture continues to ignore the real science of observing man’s history and living consistent with that history – movement throughout the day, real, pesticide/herbicide-free food, outdoors daily and early to bed-early to rise (just like the chickens!).
And, for those of us waiting for Government Dietary advice we now have it in 2015: Eat all the eggs you like.
There are news or informational items frequently written by staff or submitted to the Copper Basin News, San Manuel Miner, Superior Sun, Pinal Nugget or Oracle Towne Crier for inclusion in our print or digital products. These items are not credited with an author.
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