Researchers at the Population Health Research Institute (PHRI), McMaster University, Canada analysed the results of three long-term international studies that included data from 177,000 people in 50 countries. The aim of the research was to investigate whether egg consumption was linked to cardiovascular disease (CVD).
Dr Juliet Gray, a registered UK nutritionist, said: “This new research is particularly important as it includes a much more diverse population than many previous studies.
“All major heart and health advisory bodies in the UK now concur that the cholesterol in eggs has no significant effect on heart disease risk, as shown by most recent research in this area.
“The small number of studies showing contradictory results have tended to use older retrospective data, from higher-income countries, making it more likely that egg consumption is associated with an unhealthy diet and other factors associated with affluence which are themselves risk factors for heart disease.”
More than 146,000 of the individuals studied were from 21 countries in the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study where egg consumption was recorded using questionnaires specific to each country.
A further 31,544 patients with vascular disease in two multinational prospective studies were also investigated.
In the PURE study, after excluding people with a history of CVD, a higher intake of eggs (seven eggs a week or more) was not significantly associated with blood lipids, mortality or major CVD incidents.
The researchers concluded: “In three large international prospective studies including more than 177,000 individuals, 12,701 deaths, and 13,658 CVD events from 50 countries in six continents, we did not find significant associations between egg intake and blood lipids, mortality, or major CVD events.”