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Comment by permo-w | Hacker News Reader

>scrambled eggs back in the days when people ate eggs

do people not eat eggs anymore?

Eggs had a rough go of it in the 90s. There were studies where it seemed like even looking at an egg would cause your cholesterol to sky rocket and kill you.

One item on the rather long list of dietary advice/findings that have turned out to be wrong or overstated. Looking back at what we've been told would kill us, the older you get, the less you actually trust in the latest "findings". A local cabarettist had a 10 minute piece about this already 15 years ago. It seems, most dietary advice holds roughly 10 years, until someone else publishes another "study" and the press picks up on it to "entertain" the masses. Remember spinace and its supposed iron content? Or the milk industry doing an ad compaign (for decades!) to promote milk for school kids? The former was a misplaced comma, IIRC. And the latter was a blatant attempt to sell more product.

> Looking back at what we've been told would kill us, the older you get, the less you actually trust in the latest "findings".

Seems like a bit of confirmation bias here - tons of things that people were told would kill them, did in fact end up killing them. Science is wrong sometimes, of course, and science journalism even more often.

Well, eggs just triggered me. I am from the "I will stop eating eggs when there are no chickens anymore" team... And sure, you're definitely right. Learning about and eliminating aspestos, for instance, was probably one of the bigger well known positive counter-example from the previous century. However, I can't think of many great counter-examples when it comes to dietary advice and the science journalism (thanks for the word) attached to it. Maybe you can poke a hole in my confimraton bias?

Drinking too much soda with sugar?

Now the acidity in artificially sweetened soda makes peoples' teeth bad. My dentist mother is furious about that people believe that it is only the sugar in the soda that is bad for the teeth.

> Looking back at what we've been told would kill us, the older you get, the less you actually trust in the latest "findings".

This is where I am for sure. I don't trust any trends as to what people figure will kill you any more, because they're almost always wrong in the end. In 20 years if it turns out to not be recanted, then I'll pay attention I guess.

the misplaced comma was also a myth.

https://www5.in.tum.de/~huckle/Sutton_Spinach_Iron_and_Popey...

Thankfully, they were let out of prison. https://www.adforum.com/creative-work/ad/player/34447709/bad... (circa 1991??)

> There were studies where it seemed like even looking at an egg would cause your cholesterol to sky rocket and kill you.

Except there really weren't studies, and this is why the nutrition "science" was so bad back then. A sibling comment mentioned a study in rabbits and points out the obvious problems with making conclusions based on a herbivore, but the general belief was that since high blood cholesterol was linked with heart disease, eating a lot of cholesterol is bad for you.

When they actually did to the studies, they found that the vast majority of people do not get high blood cholesterol from (reasonable amounts of) dietary cholesterol. There are apparently a small subset of people (like 5% or so) who are particularly sensitive to dietary cholesterol though.

That was why nutrition science in the 80s/90s should be such a cautionary tale. So much of it was bad science, or more charitably there were "reasonable" hypotheses that were presented as government-sponsored "facts" that turned out to be false when they were actually tested.

> or more charitably there were "reasonable" hypotheses that were presented as government-sponsored "facts" that turned out to be false when they were actually tested.

The Covid debactle could be a more recent experience. Guesses was reported as facts. Then the flipfloping made peoples heads hurt and the consensus on what to do ended in a mess and a heated political point.

The fed a bunch of cholesterol to rabbits who then got heart disease. But it turns out you’re not a rabbit and dietary cholesterol has nowhere near the same effect on humans.

Who could have ever guessed that a herbivore would be poorly adapted to high amounts of cholesterol in their diet?

And also rabbits do not normally eat eggs, in fact aren’t even carnivores.

how do you explain easter egg bunnies then??

Not in the 1990s, no. DIETARY CHOLESTEROL BAD was the mantra of the day.

Who knows, nutritional scientist might get it right one day :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=485Em2JF34M

I do think that with the loosening of corporate control on mass media, we are slowly iterating towards reasonable dietary advice

Hope springs eternal

the current dietary advice in my local segment of society goes pretty much like this: try not to eat too many processed foods, keep it balanced, and fats aren't actually bad for you. that all sounds fairly reasonable to me

It is strange. As exposure to strange diet advice have gone up via internet exposure, Youtube, Instagram, blogs etc, the amount of people actually following strange diets seems to have gone down.

I agree with this. the fucked up diets I heard about in my youth seem to have been replaced with some quite reasonable fare. maybe a comments section was all we needed all along

Have you seen the egg prices lately...? ;-)

I am curious how much they are in your country? In Poland one egg costs about $0.30

About $0.60 currently in the USA, which is quadruple what they were at this time last year. Supposedly this is mostly because many egg suppliers had to cull their flocks due to the current H5N1 bird flu. But there is also concern that egg prices have been rising in general in the long term due to industry consolidation and monopolization.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/business/egg-prices-bird-...

> About $0.60 currently in the USA,

... IF you can find them in a store. Our local Trader Joe's (a grocery store) in SF has been out of eggs for a while.

No shortage in Seattle. About $8/dozen which is about double normal.

About USD 1.50 per dozen here in South Africa.

I would not consider Trader Joe's to be a grocery store.

One dozen is about CAD 3.00 just north of the US border. So I guess about $0.20 USD each.

anyway, the new political administration is bound to solve the problem with costly eggs any minute now, and the soaring egg prices were without a doubt caused by the previous administration :-)

USD$0.30 to $0.40 per egg in Fiji.

Why so expensive in Fiji? I mean it's not that expensive, but more than I'd expect from Fiji, where I can imagine chickens and pigs are running around everywhere between the straw huts and palm trees.

Our producers don't have the economies of scale that yours do. Also, our chickens refuse to stay in their cages and lay eggs, preferring to spend all their time lying around on hammocks under coconut trees sipping pina coladas.

> anymore

The article is from 1993, not today.

I came back here to comment this exact thing, this was a very confusing line.

I wasn’t around in 1993 but I’m pretty positive my parents and grandparents ate eggs in 1993.

I guess this line made more sense in the context of other news articles at the time.

billionaires do, us mere mortals can no longer afford them :)

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