An egg a day increases your risk of Type 2 diabetes?

First of all, apologies if this has been previously discussed as it's from a Diabetes Care journal article from 2009.

I happened to stumble on the article called Egg Consumption and Risk of Type 2 Diabetes in Men and Women (full text available on the link).

The conclusion of the study was that an egg a day increases the risk of Type 2 diabetes.

This is perplexing as lots of people on here find they get good blood sugar results from eating eggs. I remember there was a neat thread on 'how many eggs is too many' recently.

There were a number of statements in the study report that also puzzled me.

One was the statement that some of the nutrients in eggs are associated with an increased risk of T2. The study says these nutrients are saturated fat and cholesterol. I have to say this was news to me.

It also says that 'a diet rich in fat has been shown to induce hyperglycemia and hyperinsulinemia'. Again this was news to me. Isn't it true that for most people, fat does not spike blood glucose?

The study also did not differentiate between egg consumption and egg yolk or egg white consumption. I think this is a major methodological flaw. However dietitians might disagree, I think no one would dispute that egg white is one of the healthiest foods out there. Healthy from both low-fat and low-carb point of view, which is a rare achievement.


I guess ultimately this study has no impact on my life since it's about risk and the cat is out of the bag already, so to speak. But all the same it bothers me.

Good! As a T2, I’ll go back from being T1!
Research has lots of holes, doesn’t it. Seems like researchers get hyperbole by virtue of doing some study. Don’t believe what you read even when they say it is research. Somebody accepted it for publication because they were low on articles, they had to fill space.

UGH! I don’t care. LOL I think breathing can cause diabetes.

I don’t even know where to start with this study. In order to tease out this relationship, such serious contortions were required that any truth has been left as roadkill. Apparently less than 8% of the study participants actually ate more than 1 egg a week, dramatically reducing the validity of any result. Then they had to correct for some large number of confounding factors: age, BMI, smoking, alcohol, exercise, red meat, quintiles of energy intake, fruits and vegetables, saturated fatty acids, trans fatty acids, polyunsaturated fatty acids, family history of diabetes, and history of hypercholesterolemia and hypertension. OMG.



There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Pass the eggs.

LOL! She Ra. It seems like doing anything in anyway causes something don’t it?

Seems like one of those studies that starts with something they want to prove and then works backwards from there fudging as needed along the way.

More shoddy research.