Hello Health Champions. Today we're going to talk about what would happen if you were to eat five eggs a day every day for 30 days or for the rest of your life even. Then we have to understand that quality makes a big difference.
There are all these different classifications there's caged and cage-free free-range pasture-raised some are certified humane organic and others are not and there's also pasteurized. What does all this mean? Well caged is the cheapest and the worst they're basically just abiding by the minimum requirement of the law and I would stay away from basically the first three categories cage free is a little bit better but they're out of cages but they can still be crammed in together and never see the light of day free range sounds really positive right they're out on the range but in reality this is where there's the biggest confusion because in some cases these hens and chickens could actually be raised under pretty good conditions but on the other hand free range simply means that they have access theoretical access to the outside so you could have this huge huge building with a tiny little opening over at one end and there's thousands and thousands of birds and they've been raised under artificial lights our official conditions but then there's this little hole at the end of the building and theoretically they could peak their head out and then they have access and it's free range but the vast majority of these birds would never see the light a day so my minimum standard is pasture raised which doesn't mean much in itself unless it's accompanied by one of these two if it's pasteurized and certified humane then they have to have at least 108 square feet and now you know that these birds live outside they come in to spend the night but these birds are actually pastured they're free roaming they're foraging for food they're eating bugs and worms and things that hens and chickens are supposed to eat they also get sunlight and they get some exercise and movement so just like humans that makes a big difference in your health now the organic doesn't refer at all to the circumstances that's just the type of food organic means that all the feed is certified organic there's no pesticides in it but a lot of times I would rather have a non-organic pasture raised than an organic free range because I trust more that the birds that are walking outside are going to be healthier so it's not so clear-cut there then pasteurized is simply that they're decontaminated that they rinse them in hot water to decontaminate the shell from bacteria and then they keep them in a water bath to slowly raise the temperature up to a point where they kill off a lot of pathogens potential salmonella but not so warm that they start cooking the egg and some brands of eggs make a big deal out of this pasteurized and they stamp the eggs and they label the boxes but it doesn't mean a whole lot because technically according to the USDA all eggs that are sold to the public sold in stores are supposed to be pasteurized so just realize that there's a big difference between pasture raised which you absolutely want and pasteurized which most eggs are anyway so when i started talking about the quality of eggs about 10-15 years ago i pointed out that a lot of the mass-produced eggs not only are they not so healthy but they're also pale and tasteless that if you look at the yoke you're going to see that it's very pale as a reflection that there's not a lot of nutrients in there whereas if you went for pasture raised if you had any animal that had a normal life that went around and got some sunshine and so forth there would be a very very deep color to the yolk and you could definitely take the difference between these two that'd be very pale and tasteless versus very rich and full of flavor but of course you know what's coming next right if people learn to look for the color someone's going to find a way to cheat so of course now with even the mass-produced eggs they produce synthetic color so you can buy feed that gives the egg yolk the color you want so now that's not much of an indication anymore because you can find some eggs with a deep yolk that are still mass produced and where the chickens the hens were not very healthy at all and there's not much flavor or health to it one thing you get when you eat five eggs a day is you get a bunch of micronutrients the vitamins and minerals DHA is an essential fatty acid that's very supportive of brain you get vitamin d calcium iron vitamin a vitamin e you get b2 niacin b6 folate b12 biotin b5 so this is almost all of the essential b vitamins you get phosphorus you get iodine zinc selenium and choline which used to be classified as an essential b vitamin but now it's not because the body can make a little bit of it but it can't make enough to keep you healthy so it's still super super important to get choline in the diet now as impressive as these numbers are these numbers are actually from regular mass-produced eggs so if you get the pasture raised then these are going to be even more impressive the minerals are probably not going to change too much but the DHA the essential fatty acids and the fat soluble vitamins are going to be increased as much as two to six times so that means you're gonna get a hundred percent or more on a lot of these vitamins simply by eating five eggs a day what an incredible food you're also gonna get a lot of macronutrients five eggs are gonna give you 350 calories and I'm not one to count calories a whole lot but I just wanted to point out that 350 calories is not a whole lot it's only 17 percent of what most people eat in a day but you get all those micronutrients that we saw on the previous slide and this is very very filling you get so satisfied if you had this for lunch it would easily carry you over to dinner you also get 25 grams of fat out of which seven and a half grams are saturated and here is where a lot of people start choking on their toast and orange juice because this is what we've been scared about and one single egg is going to have 62 percent of all the cholesterol that you're allowed to eat in a day and here you go 925 milligrams from five eggs you're getting 310 scary numbers so we'll come back and talk about this but cholesterol is the biggest hang-up that people have about this you're also going to get 30 grams of protein and that's 60 percent of your daily allowance now some people are going to eat a lot more than that or less depending on the size and your activity but what we want to understand and talk about next is how that 30 grams actually can kind of become a lot more because protein from different foods is handled very differently it has different levels of usefulness so 5x will give you 30 grams of protein but you could also eat that from different kinds of foods so we'll see how they relate if you got 30 grams of protein from egg white or you got it from whey which is a milk protein or you got it from soy which is the protein source for most protein powders and protein bars you could get it from meat like fish chicken beef etc.
or you could get it from a whole egg now protein is supposed to become building blocks that's the unique part about protein if we want to build certain tissues like muscles or skin or bone or hair or nails we can't do that with carbohydrate or fat if we want to build enzymes if we want to build certain hormones then we have to have that protein and here's what we want to understand the better the amino acids are combined to fit our bodies the greater the percentage of this protein that becomes building blocks and the ones that we can't use for building blocks is basically wasted it becomes fuel so it's kind of like if you're building a house and you buy this big pile of lumber and if it's really good quality you could use most of that lumber to fit your house it becomes structure in your house but if you're buying inappropriate or really poor quality building materials then you might only use 15 20 percent and the rest you have to toss on the fire and it turns into energy well the body is basically the same way the better the quality of the protein the more similar it is to what you're trying to do the more gets converted into building blocks and what that means is if it turns to building blocks it doesn't really have calories it doesn't become energy until you are done with the building blocks or you can't use them for building blocks and you turn it into energy so if you were to eat 30 grams of protein from meat then one third of that becomes tissue or building blocks the rest is turned into energy if you eat soy only one sixth only half as much so the protein value of soy is only half that of meat and the same thing holds true for whey even though that is an animal product by the time we break it apart and isolate the whey we can't use it as well anymore and what about egg the whole egg we can use a half and other than mother's milk which is mostly for babies we assume the whole egg is the best protein source that we have and here's the interesting part that most people associate egg protein with the egg white because the egg white is just water and protein water and albumin and a lot of bodybuilders will bulk up on egg white they'll eat five eggs and 20 egg whites to get all that protein well the problem is you're not really getting much protein from that you're only getting one sixth to turn into tissue which is the muscle that the body builders are looking for now for a bodybuilder you can still bulk up it still kind of works but not for the reason that you think so the protein can become amino acids which is building blocks or it can turn into carbohydrate and be burned for energy carbohydrate is glucose it raises blood sugar and what happens now is the glucose stimulates insulin and this is why even non-carbohydrate foods can stimulate insulin and be in the insulin index which basically measures how much of an insulin response do we get from this food and that depends on how much or how little of that protein becomes building blocks and how much is turned into glucose so when we eat egg white 30 grams of protein from egg white we get 5 grams to become building blocks and 25 that becomes carbohydrate that becomes blood sugar now this still works for a bodybuilder because insulin is an anabolic hormone it's a storage hormone so it drives fuel both protein and glucose into the cell and therefore it helps bulk up and if you're a bodybuilder you probably have a fairly healthy metabolism metabolic health whereas this is not such a great idea if you are a diabetic if you have insulin resistance and you're trying to reverse that then you want to be much more particular about this whey and soy obviously will have the same numbers meat you have 10 grams turn into tissue 20 gram turns into fuel and with whole eggs we have half and half so even though only half becomes building blocks that's still much much better than any other food we have access to and cholesterol is probably the single biggest reason that people are afraid of eating eggs we've been told so many times that cholesterol is bad it causes heart disease and eggs are the richest source of cholesterol out there basically and they're telling us we can only eat 300 milligrams or less of dietary cholesterol per day and by the time you have five eggs you've had more than three times that daily limit so a lot of people are super scared they hear some benefits but then they hear that they're going to have a heart attack well to me that number is completely random in fact it might be the most random or arbitrary number they have ever come up with because the body makes anywhere from a thousand to three thousand milligrams of cholesterol per day if you eat less your body makes more if you eat more the body makes less and the only time that the body doesn't make more is if it can't so if the liver is really really unhealthy or interfered with if you have metal toxicity then you might see really low cholesterol levels because your liver can't make it it's too damaged and of course the other example is if you're on a statin drug because these statins interfere with what the liver is trying to do the body wants a certain amount of cholesterol but with the statin drug the body can't make it now if we make this much every day then the dietary cholesterol is rather insignificant so is cholesterol an essential nutrient well this is kind of like splitting hairs essential is a definition and essential means we have to add it from the environment because the body cannot make it at all but we can make cholesterol so from that point of definition it is not essential but it is essential in the sense that it is super super important and we're not going to be healthy if we don't get enough or if we can't make enough cholesterol is essential for nerve tissue the wires where the brain sends signals out to the different body parts they're covered with an insulation called myelin that the biggest component is cholesterol we have cell membranes we have 40 trillion cells they process billions of bits of information every second and how well they can process that information depends on the flexibility and fluidity of the cell membranes which in turn depends on cholesterol and cholesterol is also the precursor for things like hormones vitamin d and bile and here's the second biggest fear factor when it comes to eggs or animal products overall is saturated fat if you eat five eggs you get seven and a half grams of saturated fat and if you believe the official guidelines you're already 40 maxed out on your saturated fat and the reason they tell you to avoid saturated fat is that they believe total cholesterol will increase and ldl will increase now here's what i have found this is not completely untrue what is untrue is that this causes heart disease but it does tend to go up it's like a 50 50. half the people they see increased cholesterol and ldl the other half they see decreased cholesterol and ldl when they increase their saturated fat but what you have to trust is that the body knows what it's doing and if you address the truly important things then your body will take care of the rest and it doesn't really matter what the total cholesterol or ldl is but what they're telling you is that when these go up you get heart disease and therefore high saturated fat high cholesterol is a bad thing in my experience it's not because what we see is if you increase your saturated fat you get more satisfied and you know to eat more real food then you eat less carbohydrate your glucose goes down your a1c goes down these are markers for diabetes type 2 and metabolic disease your triglycerides will go down but most importantly the only cholesterol factors that really matter will get better your ldl size will increase and your hdl will go up so it doesn't really matter what the total number of cholesterol or ldl is if all the other factors get better you are getting healthier and you're moving away from heart disease now eggs are so fantastically good for the brain it needs a special mention if you eat five eggs and you eat the pasture raised where the animals have been eating bugs and getting sunshine and exercise you're going to get about 100 milligrams of epa and about 600 milligrams of dha per day and for most people this is going to be all you need so you could basically get all your essential fatty acids from five eggs now this ratio is going to be flip-flopped from what you get if you eat fish oil if you eat fish oil you're going to get more epa which is a good support for general inflammation but if you need brain support then you're looking for the higher dha and for some people taking dha as a supplement or through five quality eggs can work better than an antidepressant dha has a calming effect on the brain because it stimulates the frontal lobe and helps inhibit stress and anxiety and so forth and unlike an antidepressant it works by supporting by bringing in more of the function that's supposed to be there whereas an antidepressant interferes with the normal balance the second thing that helps the brain which you can get from eggs is called choline that's a precursor for acetylcholine which is a neurotransmitter it's a signaling molecule in the brain and it's one of the absolute most important it's one of the main ones it is involved with arousal and focus it is also involved with learning and neuroplasticity so in order for you to learn new things to develop new skills you need to rewire your brain and make new synapses and eggs with choline that is a precursor for acetylcholine can be very very supportive of this another aspect of health and brain health is the quality of sleep and acetylcholine supports rem sleep and when you have enough of that deep rem sleep then you wake up more rested and here's one more example of how the egg bashers are actually beating up the hero there is a genetic variant called mthfr that is so common that 30 to 40 percent of the world's population actually has a mutation or a variant in this gene and mthfr stands for methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase don't worry about the name but the ase at the end indicates it's an enzyme so it's involved in transforming one thing into another and you don't have to memorize any of this but if it helps you recognize this if you come across it then mthfr sounds a lot like a very popular profanity so what's more important though is what does this enzyme do it converts a bad thing into a good thing homocysteine is a byproduct it's an intermediate so the liver does its job and it kicks out some homocysteine and if everything is working this quickly turns into methionine which is a really good thing it's a sulfur containing amino acid that the body uses to make glutathione which is one of our internal antioxidants so when we don't convert this efficiently now homocysteine builds up and it becomes a huge problem it is very very inflammatory and it is one of the strongest indicators for heart disease it's been linked to miscarriages and heart disease so even though 30 to 40 percent of the world's population has this variant and it is so easy to spot and the solution is so simple most people have no idea because this is very rarely measured you could measure either the homocysteine or you could measure the mthfr the homocysteine is cheaper and easier and it's really the thing that you're looking for because that is the actual indicator of the problem and if you have an elevated homocysteine and by the way on the blood work a lot of places they'll say that anything up to 15 is okay but again that's because so many people have high levels they think it's normal you really want to be under seven and if you're over seven then what you do is you supplement and all you have to do is add in a few b vitamins and some methyl donors so b6 b9 b12 and methyl donors like trimethylglycine or methylcobalamin for b12 and most people reverse this problem very very quickly and there are several good supplements out that have the exact combination that you need to handle this so you could take a single pill and basically handle this i'll put a link down below of the one we're using in my office so the egg is fantastic it's packed with nutrition and the only drawback would be for a small percentage of people if you have an allergy or a sensitivity and unfortunately allergies are becoming more common especially in young people because a lot of the vaccines they grow these pathogens on a substrate of eggs and then they inject that so even if they just trace amounts of egg but you inject it now you can get very severe allergies but if you don't have a sensitivity then don't worry about eggs and you can eat as much as you like but be sure to cook them gently and what i recommend is soft boiled poached over easy or lightly scrambled that way you don't damage you're not going to really mess with the minerals but the essential fatty acids and some of the vitamins are a little more sensitive to heat so when i make scrambled eggs i start off with a tablespoon or so of butter you crack the eggs into the pan and then you slowly move them around without breaking the yolk until most of the egg white has hardened and then when it's close to hardened then you break the egg yolk and you stir it around on low heat and then just before it starts to harden when the egg yolk is still kind of glossy then you take it all and you don't want it to harden because then you lose a lot of the flavor and if you've never had scrambled eggs like that you're in for a treat and whatever you do don't cook your scrambled eggs so they look like this this is like what you get at a lot of hotel buffets and it is so tasteless and so rubbery if you're not careful putting it on your plate it all bounces off so that's why it's good to be familiar with intermittent fasting so you don't have to eat a breakfast at all you can wait till you get home and then you can scramble your eggs you can get some good pastured eggs and scramble them the way you like. If if you enjoyed this video you're going to love that one.
