Heart Research UK Healthy Heart Tip, written by the Health Promotion and Education Team at Heart Research UK
Healthy Heart Tip: Eggs & Heart Health
Eggs & cholesterol
Egg yolk is rich in cholesterol and therefore there has been some debate about whether people with raised cholesterol levels should eat them or whether they’ll considerably increase blood cholesterol levels.
However, experts agree that dietary cholesterol, such as that found in eggs, has much less of an effect on the level of cholesterol in your blood compared to the amount of saturated fat you are consuming.
How you eat your eggs matters
How people cook eggs varies widely and what people use to cook eggs in can differ too. We recommend poaching, boiling or baking your eggs to limit your use of oils and fats when cooking.
What we eat eggs with matters too, for example, consuming poached eggs with wholegrain bread and some vegetables is much more healthful than consuming them as part of a greasy fry up which lacks fibre.
The takeaway points
Eggs are an affordable source of protein and are rich in vitamins and minerals. It’s therefore perfectly healthy to include them as part of a balanced diet.
As with many diet recommendations, the key is moderation and not consuming one thing in excess. Specifically in relation to cholesterol, we should focus more on reducing our consumption of saturated fat rather than worrying about the cholesterol in eggs.
To help keep your heart healthy, why not try out some of our healthy recipes from our website: https://heartresearch.org.uk/heart-research-uk-recipes-2/.