by Aimee Keenan-Greene
A new study shows eggs contain less cholesterol than they did a decade ago.
A large egg contains about 30 milligrams less cholesterol when compared to eggs tested 10 years ago.
An egg now has 185 milligrams of cholesterol, down from 215 milligrams, according to the
U.S.Department of Agriculture 'Agricultural Research Service'. That's about 14 percent less.
USA Today says researchers collected large eggs from 12 locations around the country and sent them to a laboratory for testing. The drop in cholesterol might be due to improvements in hens' diets.
Eggs also have more vitamin D now, about 64 percent. It stands at 41 International Units, up from 25 IU measured several years ago, says
UPI.
"One egg has about 25 percent of the choline we need for the whole day," Registered Dietitian Cynthia Sass told
CBS today, "About 200 studies over the past 25 years have looked at the link between eggs and heart disease and found that it's not the cholesterol, but saturated fat that ups the risk of heart disease. An egg happens to be relatively high in cholesterol, but very low in saturated fat, and that's why foods like eggs and shell fish have been re-categorized as 'not so bad for you,"' Sass added.
"It's still one egg a day," Jacob Exler, PhD, a nutritionist with the Nutrient Data Laboratory at the USDA Agricultural Research Service, told
WebMD. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2010 recommends getting less than 300 milligrams daily of dietary cholesterol.
The American Heart Association says high
cholesterol is one of the major controllable risk factors for coronary heart disease, heart attack and stroke. As blood cholesterol rises, so does the risk of coronary heart disease.
Eating foods that contain saturated fats raises the level of cholesterol in your blood, says the
AHA.
Saturated fats occur naturally in many foods, mainly from meat and dairy products like fatty beef, lamb, pork, poultry with skin, beef fat (tallow), lard and cream, butter, cheese and other dairy products made from whole or reduced-fat (2 percent) milk.
Many baked goods and fried foods can contain high levels of saturated fats. Some plant foods, such as palm oil, palm kernel oil and coconut oil, also contain primarily saturated fats, but do not contain cholesterol, according to the Heart.org website.
