Egg consumption inversely correlated with Alzheimer's

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42002260/

by natbennett • 18 days ago

69 52 18 days ago

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Since the study was done on Seventh Day Adventists, it's worth noting that they are all vegetarian, so no meat based protein options here...

beering• 18 days ago

About half of the study participants were non-vegetarian, IIUC. I wonder if they found any correlation after slicing by vegetarianism?

anonym29• 18 days ago

A core part of the scientific method is that you attempt to isolate a single variable at a time. If anything, all this suggests is that this was a better diet-controlled sample population for measuring the correlation of eggs and Alzheimer's than the general public. That said, the methodology of this study does not allow for inferring a relationship between Alzheimer's and meat consumption in either direction.

adrianN• 18 days ago

It is very difficult to do that in biological systems where doing A in isolation can have the opposite effect of doing A while also doing B.

thayne• 18 days ago

There could be an interaction with the diet though. For example, what if the nutrient in eggs that prevents Alzheimer's is something that also occurs in meat?

Also, it seems likely that among this population many of those who don't or rarely consume eggs are vegan or almost vegan, so it might be more accurate to say that veganism is correlated with Alzheimer's.

mullingitover• 18 days ago

Adventists are okay with meat as long as it’s kosher generally.

I think the bigger factor is that they’re teetotalers.

My data points, though: two of my vegetarian teetotaling Adventist family members died of Alzheimer’s. The lifestyle is clearly not a cheat code for defeating dementia.

aorloff• 18 days ago

I guess I gotta be the one to ask -- so do you recall if they ate eggs ?

thin_carapace2• 18 days ago

eggs are a highly concentrated natural source of choline. meat does contain choline but nowhere near as much as eggs.

drawing the connection between cholinergic activity and alzheimers is left as an exercise for the unaware reader.

tfwnopmt2• 18 days ago

Cancer is also inversely correlated with alzheimer's.

Phrased another way, egg consumption is correlated with cancer.

recursivecaveat• 18 days ago

Not necessarily. Looking before crossing the street is inversely correlated with getting hit by a truck. Getting trucked is inversely correlated with getting mauled by a lion (most places with wild lions are light on road traffic). Doesn't mean that looking both ways will increase your odds of becoming lion chow though.

tfwnopmt2• 18 days ago

I'm not sure what this strawman is going on about, but the cancer-alzheimer's inverse correlation is a well known phenomenon

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41514-026-00442-1

adjejmxbdjdn• 18 days ago

In addition, to evaluate potential bias because of unmeasured systematic differences between consumers and nonconsumers, we conducted a sensitivity analysis excluding vegans. Vegans comprised a substantial portion of the zero egg consumption group, which could disproportionately influence this group, and they often differ in other lifestyle or health-related characteristics.

So they eliminated vegans from the sensitivity analysis despite them comprising a substantial portion of the no-egg group.

If the analysis doesn’t hold with vegans included, it’s probably saying a lot about dairy rather than eggs.

s1artibartfast2• 18 days ago

They said it held up with and without vegans, getting the same result.

Results from the sensitivity analysis excluding vegans remained very consistent with the primary findings (Table 3). The HR for consuming eggs 5 or more times/wk, compared with never/rare consumption, was 0.73 (0.60, 0.89).

bastard_op• 18 days ago

I tried to look, but the google captcha wouldn't let me, finally gave up trying.

ChrisArchitect• 18 days ago

Some previous discussion 2 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48038873

willis936• 18 days ago

Why would having alzheimer's reduce people's desire to eat eggs?

pinkmuffinere2• 18 days ago

I know you’re joking, but possible causal path here: People with Alzheimer’s lose ability to use stove -> eat simpler less involved breakfasts -> eats less eggs

krackers• 18 days ago

You can make eggs in a microwave (critically so long as you don't do it in the shell)

seanhunter• 18 days ago

They would forget where they put them.

Joking aside, (and I speak as someone who has lost 2 close members of my family to dementia), as soon as people start to experience any form of dementia, there is a sort of coping mechanism that kicks in where they stop doing “complex” things as much as they used to, because there is a huge amount of anxiety that is caused by losing short-term memory (you are constantly thrown into situations where you can’t make sense of what’s going on). So my mother-in-law for example, stopped cooking for herself long before some of the other symptoms really became apparent. She told everyone she was “bored of it”, and when cooking for a larger group she wolud constantly check and recheck the recipe. At the time it drove me crazy but then later when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s it all started to make sense.

pinkmuffinere2• 18 days ago

I’m copying this comment from discussion two months ago

Caveat:
> Funding [...] The analyses in this study were supported by an investigator-initiated grant from the American Egg Board. [...]

bwat49• 18 days ago

So one of those egg council creeps got to you too huh?

bitwize• 18 days ago

(Sonic voice) Foiled your plans again, Eggman!

unknownfuture• 18 days ago

Aw, you've got it all wrong bwat49. It's not like that!

Jimmc414• 18 days ago

Agreed that seems like a potential conflict that should be scrutinized, but it highlights a real problem in health research. Who else would fund a 40,000 participant 15 year study about egg consumption and Alzheimer’s? How many studies are not conducted because no one is interested in funding them?

fooqux• 18 days ago

Who else would fund a 40,000 participant 15 year study about egg consumption and Alzheimer’s?

Your government. Health insurances. A university. Any of the thousands of billionaires on this planet.

icegreentea2• 18 days ago

The paper is an analysis performed on a larger dataset. No one created or ran a 15 year study on egg consumption. Someone ran a 15 year study that included dietary survey questions that happened to include eggs, and then someone other group mined the dataset for this analysis.

This particular study (AHS-2) was initially funded by the NIH (and has continued with NIH and mixed funding): https://publichealth.llu.edu/adventist-health-studies/videos...

aziaziazi• 18 days ago

Also, buried in the article:

Substituting eggs for nuts/seeds or legumes in the diet was associated with a similarly reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

pseudohadamard• 17 days ago

I'm surprised no-one's linked to https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations yet.

ChiMan4• 18 days ago

Quality of this study aside, and n of 1 here, my own state of mind, clarity of thought, and sleep are all noticeably better when I'm eating 2 or 3 eggs a day, 3 to 5 days a week. (I might go 7 days, but an independent value placed on dietary variety prevents that--perhaps foolishly when I notice what I'm eating on off days instead of the eggs.)

Regardless, this whole eggs-are-evil thing has probably done more to harm the health of Westerners than any other dietary advice, with the possible exception of the fat-is-evil nonsense.

al_borland• 18 days ago

Do you think the eggs are causing the better sleep, or are you more likely to have the energy to make eggs in the morning if you’d had a good night’s sleep?

ChiMan4• 18 days ago

It seems the eggs improve the sleep, because after poor sleep, eggs the following day seem to have an effect on breaking the poor-sleep doom loop (which is: poor sleep elevates cortisol, adrenaline, heart rate, junk-food cravings, and the need for caffeine--all of which contribute to another night of bad sleep). Not sure if it's the choline, which eggs have a lot of, or the egg-generated satiety that helps prevent eating too much. I think it may be the choline because when I'm otherwise eating high-choline foods such as red meat, my sleep is also better.

hallole• 18 days ago

Given that a great number of Westerns are overweight, it's probably appropriate for them to act as though "fat is evil" due to calorie density. Plus: saturated fat should be avoided; this is another thing Westerners are likely to be getting too much of.

ChiMan4• 18 days ago

Except that three saturated-fat-laden strips of bacon for breakfast prevents the need for lunch, leaving my daily caloric intake lower than if I had eaten a bagel for breakfast and been hungry at lunch. The longer period between meals--snack-free--afforded by the bacon also means that post-meal insulin (the energy-storing hormone) has a chance to drop off, leaving glucagon (the energy-burning hormone) a path for liberating stored energy to power physical and mental activity.

b3lvedere2• 18 days ago

Sugar ( in all its names and molecular forms ) is evil, because of the vast amount it is in processed food products. Eggs and fat not so much. But they would be if that is the next ‘cheap molecule to make processed food cheap’.

cogman102• 16 days ago

A recent study I saw suggests that dietary cholesterol may in fact reduce LDL cholesterol. [1]

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10697-z

sph• 18 days ago

To the egg lovers among us: what percentage of the mass you ingest over the lifetime do you think eggs total up to? Shall we say 5%?

Suppose the remaining 95% is healthy vegetables, or a ludicrous amount of junk food. Do you think you can attribute any effect to eggs over the course of a lifetime?

Of course not. However that is how dietary research works, and together with the blatant conflict of interest in this case, still call themselves a science whose findings get readily published in social media and newspapers.

If I were king of this place, the first thing I would do would be to ban papers on nutrition, and nothing of value would be lost.

KashifNY• 16 days ago

seems as if most of the daily necessities in peoples lives are having some sort of issues and with recent findings are having people avoid them.

Egg consumption inversely correlated with Alzheimer's

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