Actually, eggs are part of those super-foods that gather all the nutrients that are useful for your health. But because yolks are known to be high in cholesterol, eggs have covered a bad reputation. In order to cope with the main questions about your cholesterol needs, here’s an article that aims at explaining it. You may know how many eggs can you safely eat a day.
The way human’s body regulates cholesterol levels
Generally, cholesterol is seen as negative. The reason is that there are some studies that have shown that cholesterol is a main cause of heart disease and early death. But this is not necessarily true. In fact, cholesterol has a main role in the human’s body. As a structural molecule, it is vital to all the cell membrane of the body.
Besides, egg is also very useful to produce steroid hormones such as testosterone, estrogen and even cortisol. And as the cholesterol plays such an important role in the body, this last has known how to adapt it function in order to have enough cholesterol to fulfill the daily body’s needs.
Once you become to eat more cholesterol that your body needs, the liver stops producing it so that the cholesterol level is not too much. Besides, you should also know that eating excessive amounts of cholesterol when you have rising blood level. In the contrary, if you take less cholesterol, it will lead to a moderate increase in blood cholesterol levels.
Consequences of eating many whole eggs per day
It’s been a long time that people have been recommended to limit their consumption of eggs. For some studies, it is egg yolks that you should not eat excessively. For your information, notice that within a single medium-sized egg, there is 186 mg of cholesterol, which represent 62% of the indicated daily intake(RDI). At the contrary, the white containsmore protein and has lowcholesterol intake.
But the most common advice says that it is safe to take 2 to 6 yolks per day. But some scientific suggests that is not enough. In order to get the right number of safe egg, some studies have been examined.
To realize the studies, the participants have been divided into two groups where the first should eat 1 to 3 whole egg per day and the other group should eat egg substitutes such as powder egg.
After these studies, it has been shown that good HDL cholesterol has risen in almost all cases. As far as total and bad HDL cholesterol levels are concerned, they are unchanged. For those who ate the omega-3 enriched eggs, it has been seen that there was a lower rate of blood triglycerides which constitutes a consequent risk factor.
Otherwise, the studies have also shown that there was an increase of blood levels of carotenoid antioxidants such as lutein and zeaxanthin. But generally, these results mainly depend on the individual.
For instance, some 70% of people do not get the bad LDL cholesterol within the eggs that they eat. The other 30% are, at the contrary hyper-responders and can see their bad LDL cholesterol rise each time they eat excessive egg.
Even if eating a little amount of egg can raise blood cholesterol in some people, the turn the bad LDL particles from small and dense to large. If you are among the kind of people that present predominantly large LDL particles, you present a lower risk of heart disease. In this case, the fact of eating egg is for nothing for the increase in total and LDL cholesterol levels. So, if you are a healthy person, the science can affirm that eating 3 whole eggs per day is totally safe.