Can you eat one egg everyday?

By Penelope A. Domogo, MD

Can you eat one egg every day? You can but I strongly would NOT recommend it. “Why?” you ask. You continue and say “It is easy to cook, it is easily available, it is affordable and it is yummy. Besides, we are taught that we should eat eggs everyday.” Now what? I still would NOT recommend eating eggs everyday. Why?
Primary reason why I don’t recommend eating eggs everyday is that it is not possible naturally to do so. I said “not possible NATURALLY.” Simple really. God controlled egg production so that we will not eat it every day. You see, I believe in a super-loving God, our Father. I believe that this super-loving God created me and you, dear reader, and the rest of the Universe. He created me and you and He provided everything we need to live and be well and be happy. As a loving Father and just like human fathers, He does not give us anything we want. He just gives us all we need. Repeat, He gives us all we NEED, not all we WANT. So if my loving Father did not make it possible for me to eat eggs everyday then I go along his design. Put another way, if my loving Father does not give me eggs everyday, then I believe He knows what is best for me and go along His will. Not my will, Father, but your will be done.
How did God give eggs? God’s design is that an egg will be laid only when a rooster and a hen mate. Just like human beings, we can only have babies when there is union of the egg and the sperm. That is the natural order of things and this natural order is the design of our Creator, not Albert Einstein or anybody else. Only Virgin Mary had the virgin birth. Please correct me if I am wrong.
In this natural order of things, hens (after mating with the rooster) will lay one egg a day until 20 eggs, more or less. “Danet ukupan.” The hen will incubate these eggs for them to become chickens. Some eggs are infertile and will hatch and we call them “na-ibbong” in Besao – these eggs are what we will eat as eggs. The chicks are raised to be adult chickens so more people can partake of it. These chickens are what we will use in the many indigenous or modern rituals – gobbao, dawak, senga, am-among, birthdays, graduation, etc. I remember that when we were young children, we would only butcher one chicken during our birthdays, and that one chicken was enough for everybody in the household, about 10 people. Last Wednesday, I had a lively discussion with some mothers and fathers in Guinzadan Sur, Bauko, (thank you, friends) regarding this topic and one shared that this one chicken that they would butcher during occasions would even feed neighbors and relatives. Masika. It is amazing how one chicken, and small at that because it is native, could feed so many. There you are, that’s our version of the feeding of the five thousand. The family could feed so many because they did not eat the egg. Instead, they let it hatch and become a chicken.
In our local history, eggs were not part of our regular diet. Eggs were eaten only in special circumstances like raw egg was given to a pregnant woman in difficult labor or boiled egg was given to a sick child. Sometimes, an egg was used in rituals. I have this suspicion that even other societies in the country and abroad did not eat eggs regularly. Precisely because eggs are not that available naturally. Artificial eggs are a creation of the factory, not by God, and so have been in this world only recently. I remember that in my birthplace Besao, we had layer hens and hybrid pigs in the 1960s. So this is less than 60 years experience with artificial eggs and yet because it is so available, we are now seeing the adverse effects of eating too much eggs.
Let us see the wisdom of this natural order of things, in other words, the wisdom of our Creator. It is sad that after sustaining the human race and the universe for billions of years, we still don’t believe in our God. And we are proud to call ourselves Christians! Buti na lang sia na rin ang nagpanday sa atin so He knows our weakness and is “slow to anger.” Anyway, this is where our modern gadgets come in. Our modern gadgets have dissected the egg and examined its microscopic contents and viola! They have discovered that one egg contains around 185 to 250 mg. cholesterol. Cholesterol is a kind of fat. Science has also shown that animals make cholesterol in their own bodies and that includes us people. This is because we need cholesterol for some bodily functions. Because our bodies are able to make enough cholesterol, we don’t need to take in additional cholesterol. So if you eat even one egg, the cholesterol it contains is extra in your body. In nature, a little extra, once in a while, is not dangerous. But if you eat it daily, you run the risk of accumulating fat in your blood and in your blood vessels. This fat will make your blood sticky or malapot and this slows down the flow of your blood. If blood flow slows down, these fat will have more chances of sticking to your blood vessels making your blood vessels narrow. Sticky blood and/or narrowed blood vessels will make your heart pump stronger. Result? High blood pressure and/or heart failure. Or kidney failure or fatty liver, eye damage, ear problems, etc. Remember that all our body functions depend on the effortless flow of blood to all parts of our body. In other words, our health and well-being depends on this easy flow of our blood. Whew! And I am talking only about eggs.
What about the butter, the bacon, the cheese, the ham, the hotdog, the meat, that you ate in addition to the eggs? How about the milk, the chocolate and the dairy creamer that you drank with your meal? Geez, these all contain cholesterol! Cholesterol comes from animal products.
There are researches showing that eating eggs everyday is not bad. However, Dr. Michael Greger, Fellow of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, says that these researches are funded by the egg industry and were only conducted in the short term. I recommend that you read his online publications in NutritionFacts.org. When a research on a product is funded by the industry that produces the product, then there is conflict of interest and it becomes questionable already. It is up to you if you believe them. Furthermore, the effect of egg eating should be observed in the long term, ten to twenty years at least because that’s how life is. What you do today has short and long term effects. Many years ago, I challenged an officemate to experiment with daily egg eating as he insisted that we release the poster saying eat an egg daily. I would buy the eggs and pay for his monthly laboratory tests but he should eat one egg a day, for a year, two years. This is because the poster just says, “eat one egg a day.” This is a dangerous advise. It does not say when to stop. Well, this person did not take on the challenge. So I still pose this challenge to anyone, especially to people who insist that it is good to eat eggs every day. By the way, the cholesterol in the egg is only found in the egg yolk. The egg white is pure protein naman. Now you know why eggs are yummy. It is because they have fat aka cholesterol. Anybody up to the challenge? Please contact me through the editor of this paper.**
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“Everything is permissible for me- but not everything is beneficial. Everything is permissible for me – but I will not be mastered by anything.” 1 Corinthians 6:12