“When Low Risk Means High Risk”
The latest meta-analysis, pooling data from more than a dozen studies involving more than 300,000 people, indicates that there is a dose dependent association between egg consumption and the risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
Everyone who eats the standard Western diet, in fact, is a high-risk individual when it comes to heart disease.
In a sick population like ours where nearly everyone is eating lots of saturated fat and cholesterol, adding some more saturated fat and cholesterol in the form of eggs may just take us from one sorry state— probably dying from heart disease— to another sorry state— still probably dying from heart disease.
So when the federal guidelines say we need to really restrict dietary cholesterol, especially if we’re at high risk for heart disease, we need to realize that nearly all Americans that live past middle age are at high risk of dying from heart disease.
A 20-year old man might feel it’s safe to smoke and eat egg yolks because his heart attack is 45 years or so in the future. But why would he want to accelerate the progression of the atherosclerotic plaque to bring it on sooner?
Stopping egg yolks after a heart attack would be like quitting smoking after lung cancer is diagnosed. Whether we smoke for 25 years or 35 years, our risk of lung cancer may be about the same: really high, but about the same.
So the tobacco industry could truthfully tell someone who’s smoked for most of their lives, for the last 25 years, “Keep smoking, don’t worry, you can keep smoking and your risk of lung cancer won’t go up” (conveniently just failing to mention that you’re already really at high risk, and if you quit completely your risk would drop dramatically). And the same way the egg industry can design a study showing that adding eggs doesn’t make much of a difference, but make the same convenient omission.
Instead of going from high risk to high risk, better to go to low risk, or no risk.
“当患心脏病的风险看起来低，而实际却高的时候，我们该怎么做呢？”
最新的荟萃分析汇总了涉及超过300,000人的十几项研究数据，这些数据表明，鸡蛋的摄入量与心血管疾病和糖尿病的风险息息相关。
实际上，每个吃标准西式膳食的人在患心脏病方面都是高危人群。
在像我们这样的患病人群中，几乎每个人都在摄入大量的饱和脂肪和胆固醇，再加上更多的饱和脂肪和胆固醇是以鸡蛋的形式进入人体体内，这就可能会让我们从一个悲惨的状况（可能死于心脏病）进入到另一个悲惨的状况（可能仍然死于心脏病）。
因此，当联邦膳食指南告诉我们，我们真的需要限制膳食胆固醇摄入量的时候，我们需要意识到的是，几乎所有美国中老年人都处在死于心脏病的高风险之中，尤其是当我们本就是患心脏病的高危人群的时候，我们就更需要限制膳食胆固醇的摄入了。
一个20岁的年轻人可能会觉得抽烟和吃蛋黄是安全的，因为他可能要到大约45年以后才会出现心脏问题。 但是，他为什么还要抽烟和吃鸡蛋来加速体内动脉粥样硬化斑块的形成，让自己更早患上心脏病呢？
在心脏病发作后才停止食用蛋黄，就好像在被诊断出肺癌后才戒烟一样。无论我们的烟龄是25年还是35年，我们得肺癌的概率大致上可能是相同的：概率都很高，但数值非常接近。
因此，烟草业就能和25年以上烟龄的老烟民开诚布公了，他们说：“你可以继续吸烟，担心健康问题是完全没有必要的，继续吸烟也不会使你患肺癌的风险增加”（他们只是没有告诉你，你已经处于患肺癌的高风险之中了，而如果你完全戒烟的话，你的肺癌风险将大大下降）。同样的，鸡蛋行业也可以设计出一项研究，来证明在膳食中添加鸡蛋的话，对健康并不会造成多大的差别，也这么避重就轻地和大众说就可以了。
与其吃鸡蛋令我们从患心脏病的高风险走向更高风险，不如我们选择转变生活方式，采取限制鸡蛋的摄入量来降低或者消除患心脏病的风险吧！