A new study has overturned the conventional belief that eating a lot of eggs increases the risk of developing diabetes. Even eating more than three eggs a day did not significantly raise diabetes risk regardless of age, the research found.
Kangbuk Samsung Hospital of Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine said Wednesday that a joint research team of professors Jung Joo-young and Park Sung-keun of the Seoul Health Screening Center and Jung Yeon-koo of the Department of Neurosurgery reached this conclusion after tracking 91,005 adults who underwent health examinations at the hospital in 2011-2012 for an average of 6.9 years.
Whether eggs — regarded as a complete food alongside milk and legumes — raise diabetes risk has long been a subject of debate in academia. One study conducted in the United States reported that excessive egg consumption was associated with an increased risk of diabetes, but this correlation did not appear in countries outside the United States. Large-scale studies of Koreans also lacked clear evidence.
The research team divided subjects into six groups by egg consumption level — fewer than one per week, one to fewer than three per week, three to fewer than seven per week, one to fewer than two per day, two to fewer than three per day, and three or more per day — and examined the risk of developing diabetes. As a result, even the group that ate three or more eggs a day did not show a significantly higher risk of developing diabetes than those who ate almost no eggs. A similar tendency was observed among men and women, as well as when diabetes risk was analyzed using age 45 as a benchmark. The research team's assessment is that rather than eggs themselves being the problem, cooking methods and foods consumed alongside eggs may have affected diabetes risk.
"Americans tend to cook and eat eggs mainly with high-calorie, high-fat processed foods such as butter, bacon and sausage, which may have led to a higher diabetes risk," Professor Jung Joo-young said. "Koreans consume eggs mainly with vegetable-based side dishes or Korean meals, so we speculate that eggs themselves do not independently raise diabetes risk."
"This large-scale, long-term follow-up study confirmed that egg consumption does not raise the risk of developing diabetes in Korean adults," Professor Park Sung-keun stressed. "The result is consistent with the guidelines of major global nutrition organizations that have declared egg consumption is not harmful to the health of the general population."
The findings were published in the latest issue of the Yonsei Medical Journal.
