How would your body react if you ate 720 eggs in 28 days? A doctoral student at Harvard University decided to undertake this seemingly bonkers experiment to track changes in his blood cholesterol levels. During the “eggsperiment,” he ate only twice a day: from 10 to 11 in the morning and then around 6 in the evening. Each meal consisted of 12 eggs. After the experiment, the level of low-density lipoprotein (bad cholesterol) in his body decreased by a whopping 20%, which in turn disproves the common belief that eating eggs leads to an increase in cholesterol.
Cholesterol is an organic fatty substance necessary for normal metabolism, and almost 80% of it is produced in the liver. Recent studies show that eating eggs if you are otherwise healthy, does not bump up your cholesterol levels or make you more prone to getting heart disease. For example, earlier this year, experts at the Duke Clinical Research Institute in Durham, North Carolina, found that people who ate 12 eggs a week had the same cholesterol levels after four months as those who ate fewer than two.
LDL (low-density lipoprotein) can build up as plaque and clog the arteries, which is why it’s considered the bad kind of cholesterol. Naturally, treating all that nasty plaque seriously increases the risk of heart disease and stroke. The liver is the primary source of cholesterol, but foods like eggs also contain it. The yolk contains all 186 mg of a large egg.
According to Nick, eggs get a bad rap since a lot of people think that if you have high cholesterol, it’s from food, and because eggs are high in cholesterol, you need to cut back on them. But actually, the body is very good at regulating things like things that come with food.
So, to have some variety during the experiment, Nick prepared eggs in multiple different ways, from regular fried to an omelet. He added spices and other yummy ingredients. Of course, he also included proteins such as meat and fish but followed a low-carb diet for the first two weeks—less than 20 g a day, no more than one apple. After that, Nick bumped the intake to 60 g a day. On a low-carb diet, LDL levels usually rise because the body starts burning fat. But when you add carbs, it drops faster because you’re getting more energy from carbs. This explains why cholesterol levels dropped by only 2% in the first two weeks and by another 18% after the second week. He slept seven hours a day, ate 3,200 calories a day, and did not lose or gain any weight.
One of the biggest questions about this “eggsperiment” was whether there were any side effects, such as flatulence or constipation. According to Nick, it seemed that his body had adapted to consuming a lot of fat and protein. His previous supervised experiments involved eating 12 Oreos a day on a high-protein diet for 16 days to demonstrate how the carbohydrates from the cookies could lower cholesterol. That time, his LDL dropped by more than 70%, but his goal was not to tell people to eat cookies or stop taking statins but to understand how it affects the body.
In the end, Nick assumed that eating 720 eggs for one month, which is 133,200 mg of cholesterol, would not raise the LDL, aka the “bad” cholesterol. And indeed, it didn’t, not even a little. Even though the amount of cholesterol in his diet increased more than fivefold, the LDL cholesterol level actually decreased. He realized that when choosing the best diet for a certain person, you must first take into account their initial metabolic state and the goals that they set for themselves.