An Eggsample of Misinformation

by Namaste Publishing Staff

Quite a few years ago I bought an electric egg cooker, because I enjoy both boiled and poached eggs. It was in the shape of a hen, sat on my counter, and worked well for a time. Its ability to cook eggs with a firm white and soft center was so much more reliable than plunging the eggs into water that, when it wore out, I went out and bought another. The new model was in the shape of an egg. A few days ago, it too burned out.

So I scoured the kitchen shops, and in process of seeking a new egg cooker got into a conversation about eggs.

“I always cook my eggs hard boiled,” said one of the staff.

“I eat the white,” said another, “and throw out the yolk.”

“Why do you throw out the yolk?” I quizzed.

“Oh, all that cholesterol,” the person explained. “I don’t want to get cholesterol into my arteries. That’s why I never eat the yolk.”

Cholesterol has been big news for the past several decades, and eggs got a large slice of the blame for clogged arteries. This is why, throughout North America, you can find “eggbeater” breakfast offerings at restaurants, billed as “reduced cholesterol.”

As for cooking at home, recipes advise that we can “reduce the number of fat-filled egg yolks in baked goods” by substituting two egg whites for one whole egg. Alternatively, there are those low-cholesterol powdered or frozen egg substitutes. Or, says the advertising, you can buy a drug that blocks the absorption of cholesterol and eat your eggs anyway.

Whichever of the choices above you elect, you’ll be shortchanging your health. That’s because eggs were jumped on unjustly as a cause of heart disease, the result of faulty research. If you test powdered eggs that have been oxidized, you’ll certainly come up with a bad reading! Many industrially-modified foods are harmful to the body.

You may be surprised to learn that in a book packed with over 450 pages of information, health researcher Ron Garner devotes only two pages to the bugaboo of cholesterol. That’s it—two pages. Conscious Health, you see, isn’t backed by research carried out by people with a profit in mind, and it doesn’t focus on the latest fad as a “cause” or “cure.” It takes a wholistic approach to health.

The body needs cholesterol, and when it doesn’t receive an adequate amount from your diet, it manufactures it. Cholesterol is a key ingredient in health—especially the health of your brain.

You don’t want too much cholesterol. Gallstones, for example, contain a lot of cholesterol combined with calcium salts. But the reason people get gallstones isn’t a simple matter of eating too many eggs. It’s because their diet is overly acid-producing instead of tipped slightly in favor of alkali-producing foods. (If you want to learn how to alkalinize your body for better health, it’s covered extensively in Conscious Health.)

Eggs can be a regular part of an overall balanced diet, in which lots of fresh vegetables are eaten, and they can be consumed both raw and lightly cooked. They are a nearly perfect source of protein.

But it’s a matter of how the eggs are produced, and how they are prepared. If you are eating regular store-bought eggs, from hens in cages, you are not getting the healthy kind of egg that you get when an egg is produced by hens running around in a field. You are receiving a lot of chemicals fed to hens that exist in continuously stressed conditions—hens that amount to nothing but laying machines.

You’ll want to buy organic eggs at the very least. But even more preferable, find a local supply of eggs from hens raised outdoors on pasture, and not given chemicalized feed. If you can’t find local eggs, you can buy pastured eggs online (simply type “pastured eggs” into Google, for instance).

Eggs from a healthy supply can be eaten raw if you like them this way. Generally, the less cooked foods are, the better they are for us. But healthily-raised hard boiled eggs, while not as nutritionally available to the body, are not harmful as part of an overall healthy diet that contains a good proportion of raw plant foods to sweep excess cholesterol from the body.

It’s vital not to allow eggs to oxidize. Once you crack an egg, eat or cook it immediately. When the yellow starts to darken from standing, it’s oxidizing—just like an apple does if you leave it sitting out after you cut into it. Oxidized egg yolks are not healthy.

Eggs that are naturally raised and untampered with—which leaves out the packaged kinds on supermarket shelves—will serve your body’s needs well when combined with a wholesome diet of the kind recommended in Conscious Health.