It is OK to go to work regularly on an egg, health experts said today as they attempted to dispel "the ingrained misconception" among consumers and some health professionals that people should eat no more than three a week because of the "myth" surrounding the food's link to cholesterol in the blood.
They said the public had not caught up with changing health advice that no longer limited consumption as part of a balanced diet, except for the one in 500 people who had a genetic propensity to high cholesterol.
Juliet Gray and Bruce Griffin of Surrey University effectively revived the 1950s and 1960s advertising slogan, saying years of scientific studies had overturned earlier suggestions that cholesterol in foods strongly influenced levels in the blood and therefore was a risk factor for heart disease.
Saturated fats were far more dangerous – a message reinforced by the government's Food Standards Agency (FSA), they said.
The academic review of the evidence appears in the British Nutrition Foundation's Nutrition Bulletin, whose editorial board commissioned the article. The authors are also advisers to the British Egg Industry Council, which last November commissioned a survey that suggested 45% of the public still thought they should eat no more than three eggs a week.
Griffin, a professor of nutritional metabolism, said people did not need to limit consumption. "Indeed they can be encouraged to include them in a healthy diet as they are one of nature's most nutritionally dense foods." He added: "It is safe to go to work on an egg."
Hilary Jones, the TV GP, said many family doctors still believed the myth. And Cath MacDonald, nutritionist for the British Egg Information Service, said: "Eggs should now move from a food that is restricted to one that is proactively recommended as part of a healthy diet."
Since its inception in 2000, the FSA has never recommended a limit on eggs, while the British Heart Foundation changed its advice in 2007.
In the mid-1960s, Britons ate an average of about five eggs a week, but dietary advice helped drive that figure down to less than two in the mid-1990s. The guidance was driven at first by attitudes in the US and scientific papers that failed to differentiate between saturated fats and cholesterol in food, and later by salmonella scares.
Consumption has risen slightly since then. The egg industry is unlikely to go back to the old slogan, however, partly because of lack of money. An attempt in 2007 to revive the famous Tony Hancock ads fell foul of the Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre, now Clearcast, because the suggestion that people should have eggs every day was not nutritionally balanced.
