A Chicken Egg Question

Are you trying to be healthy?

Watching your calories?

Exercising regularly?

And, always tossing out the yolks when you make your veggie omelet? 

Time to reconsider! 

Whole eggs don't raise your risk of heart disease -- in fact, according to nutrition coach Liz Wolfe, NTP, author of Eat The Yolks, it may be worse for your health to not eat them.

The Scrambled Facts:

Egg yolks, along with other sources of saturated fat and cholesterol, came under fire in the wake of research by Nikolai Anichkov at the turn of the 20th century. 

Anichkov fed rabbits pure cholesterol and noted that their arteries clogged up with plaque, leading to a hypothesis that cholesterol promotes heart disease. But since then, there have been questions raised about how closely the two are related. 

Wolfe counters: “Rabbits have nothing in common with human bodies ... and cholesterol isn't part of their diet anyway.”

The findings gave rise to a witch hunt that demonized foods high in fat and cholesterol. 

Researcher Ancel Keys made headlines in the 1950s with his Seven Countries' Study, which almost single-handedly set the line of thinking on saturated fat that prevails today. 

Keys claimed that after looking at the average diets of populations in seven different countries, he was able to determine that those who ate the most animal fat had the highest rates of heart disease. 

But his analysis was flawed. 

Although Keys' data did show a connection between fat and heart disease, he couldn't demonstrate that the relationship was causal. 

Furthermore, while mortality rates for heart disease were higher in the countries that consumed the most animal fat, deaths from nearly ever other cause were lower -- and overall life expectancy was higher.

More concrete findings have come to light in the years since. In 2010, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a meta-analysis -- the collected findings of 21 different studies -- which stated that "saturated fat was not associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease, stroke or coronary vascular disease."