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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a perfect example of why there is so much bad "logic" in nutrition science. Everything in this article may be true (potatoes with sprouts have a higher concentration glycoalkaloids), but there is 0 evidence that is something any human actually needs to worry about, especially given the other comments in this thread.

It's similar to the bad advice that was prevalent in the US for decades that eggs are bad for you. Thinking was just basically "People with high cholesterol are at greater risk of coronary disease, and egg yolks have a lot of cholesterol, thus, egg yolks bad." When they did actual studies, they found this to be nonsense for the vast majority of people because eating more eggs did not raise their serum cholesterol levels.

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Source?

Here is a cohort study of 521,120 participants recruited between 1995 and 1996 and prospectively followed up until the end of 2011:

''intakes of eggs and cholesterol were associated with higher all-cause, CVD, and cancer mortality. The increased mortality associated with egg consumption was largely influenced by cholesterol intake. Our findings suggest limiting cholesterol intake and replacing whole eggs with egg whites/substitutes or other alternative protein sources for facilitating cardiovascular health and long-term survival.''

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33561122/

I wonder if the whole egg eaters also ate more bacon?

yeah the nitrates would be a quicker way to cancer in my intuitive brain

It could even be the teflon from the frying pan.

This is a suggestive study, but far from conclusive on its own.

Given the popular zeitgeist around egg consumption, it’s quite likely that those who eat eggs are also more likely to engage in other riskier or unhealthful activities.

This study seems to try to look for confounds, but in the end is a self-report study, which (again given common attitudes around egg consumption) means that I’d be looking for huge effect sizes to believe there is something real going on.

As it is, you’d have to believe that people who care about health but eat eggs anyway are less than 7% more likely to underreport their cholesterol consumption. (Number made up, but the effect size in the paper is about a 7% greater risk.)

I was specifically referring to when the US, relatively recently, changed the dietary guidelines regarding egg consumption: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/eggs-fats...

They provide 2 cases at the bottom, one of a woman getting slightly ill and one of a man being hospitalized for 3 days. Sources not listed but I don't really have any reason to believe poison.org is fabricating stories about potato based sickness.

Did you see the "This Really Happened" sidebar next to the article? Sure it's anecdata at best, but certainly worthy of some concern if true.

I mean growing up in a third world country we did have a grandma’s knowledge kind of a thing about sprouted potatoes and avoiding them if it’s sprouted quite a bit. However we also were taught to remove the “eyes” and the side of the potato that’s turned green and the rest is completely edible. I’ve been doing this for decades and haven’t been even remotely sick even once.

Potatoes are nightshades. It is entirely reasonable that in some situations they might be bad for you.

We stored them for months in root cellars before electric refrigeration.

Root cellars are better for storing them than refrigerators.

And too add to this, dietary intake of cholesterol in general has less of an effect on serum cholesterol levels then people realise. This is especially true for eggs iirc due to the how the cholesterol is found within them.

Anyway, cholesterol is an indicator, not a cause. If you do stuff to add cholesterol to your bloodstream, you just muddy the signal. Your liver produces cholesterol according to what it perceives a need for.

So one of those Egg Council creeps got to you too, huh?

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