Medical student ate 700 eggs in a month and his cholesterol levels dropped | Hacker News Reader

Medical student ate 700 eggs in a month and his cholesterol levels dropped

nypost.com

51 pointsamai28 comments

I have a friend who consumed massive quantities of free eggs at Meta as a form of petty revenge. Egg prices were high at the time and they disliked the company but work is work. My friend ended up with major cholesterol issues.

The condition was easily fixed by stopping the eggs and we laugh about it now. But I think the counterexample is worthwhile for anyone considering a strange diet habit. Always check in with your doctor if you take something like this up and start feeling weird.

It seems OP did it in ketosis, and then slowly experimented with adding healthy carbs back in limited amounts.

Unless otherwise mentioned, I assume your friend added a bunch of eggs to his existing diet, which is comparing apples and oranges.

What I’d like to get across is to check in with your doctor if you take on a strange diet habit.

I disagree with the point that this is apples and oranges though. Both consumed mass quantities of eggs. If the only difference is ketosis, I’d say that’s a fair comparison and the exact sort of thing a doctor could advise on.

I would only add to be careful when talking to doctors. There are still doctors that talk in terms of good and bad cholesterol rather than taking a lipid panel and getting a graph of small dense to large buoyant particles within the cholesterol. To make matters worse many of them in the USA have been corrupted by financial incentives to push statins and that is another deep and endless topic all in and of itself.

> many of them in the USA have been corrupted by financial incentives to push statins

The pharma companies don't have to do anything more than get a steering committee to say "we recommend lowering blood cholesterol" when there's really only one very effective way to do so in the absence of major dietary changes - and that is statins. Once the American College of Cardiology says you need to do that, exactly how is a family doctor in a small town supposed to defend him or herself from charges of malpractice for not prescribing them?

Imagine the courtroom scene. "Doctor, where did you go to medical school?" "At the Directional State University College of Medicine." "And where did you do your residency?" "At Second State University College of Medicine." "And are you board-certified in cardiology?" "No." "Prior to their visit, did the deceased patient ever have a documented reaction to a cholesterol-lowering drug?" "Not to my knowledge." "So, doctor, why did you not follow the recommendations of the highest-level association of cardiologists in the country? [mic drop]"

There are financial incentives, but they are all stick, no carrot. I'm an anesthesiologist, so I pick the drugs I use - but unless I use the cheapest option, the hospital pharmacy is going to freak out. And I don't have many patented drugs available to me (I can think of three, of which we really only use two; there are probably a couple of others that are out there that I'm not thinking of, but they won't be commonly used). One of those, however, is absolutely amazing magic; nothing else works in the same way, it fixed a problem dating back about 80 years, and it's so useful that a lot of hospitals don't use anything else for the purpose. And I get lunch about twice a year. Big deal: I can get free food from the hospital cafeteria every meal if I want. It's better than hospital food, but it's not a steak-and-wine dinner, let alone a free vacation for "consulting".

This method is cheaper for pharma companies than the old way, which is why the PhRMA "code" prevents them from giving me even a pen. Device companies have no such agreement.

Which is to say: we don't get free trips to St Barts with all-you-can-snort coke bars.

Financial incentives is not an issue in all countries of the world. I assume you are referring to financial incentives of medical doctors in the US.

Very fair point. I am disenfranchised from medical institutions in the USA and sometimes forget to look at the time. Edited my comment to clarify my location.

He's right to point out the difference. Human metabolic pathways for processing carbs and fats are capable of functioning independently and lab animals used as human analogs can live happy healthy lives exercising either. But they seem to interfere with each other when both are operating simultaneously, even in the lab animals, and that results in obesity and decreased quality of life outcomes.

another point worth mentioning is some substances the body cannot synthesize: vitamins, amino acids.

cholesterol.. cholesterol is not one of them. the body happily synthesizes as much cholesterol as it likes. so diet this and diet that associate with high cholesterol, sure. but also genetic. if the body synthesizes cholesterol, there will be population variation in how much cholesterol or how little cholesterol a person makes. And yes, some people do have super duper high cholesterol and go on statins automatically. so if someone says me "this person had high cholesterol, this one low, what's with that, we have not disproven a genetic contribution in the first place not to mention a gorillion other confounders

I've had several doctors, some with a general approach and some more specialized on fitness and nutrition regarding questions about vegan/vegetarian/OMAD/intermittent fasting and I can't remember them being in agreement on anything. Felt like talking with an overly confident LLM more often than I'd like. Might be different in other countries but in Germany I'll just stick with trial and error and be my own doctor until I break a bone or something. Pairing multiple LLMs for these questions brought great results though, as long as you dedicate the time to research and make sure you're not just blindly following instructions you don't understand yourself. My trust in Western medicine has suffered already around 2016-2017 but ever since 2020, it's obvious this system isn't working at all.

i didn’t take the advice as “ask your doctor whether this is a good idea” (I also doubt the average GP’s ability to say anything useful about nutrition) but more as “keep your doctor in the loop of doing a weird diet and do regular check-ups for obvious markers like cholesterol”

i’d qualify eating 700 eggs as weird enough to warrant keeping your dr in the loop.

Yeah, that’s more what I meant. My friend actually went to separate doctors and they were all in disagreement about the cause. Some saying, “it can’t be the eggs!”

They all agreed on the high cholesterol though.

> “keep your doctor in the loop of doing a weird diet and do regular check-ups for obvious markers like cholesterol”

Who the hell actually does this? I find this whole “talk to your doctor about your diet regularly” advice very unrealistic. Are you all just filling out some legal advice so you don’t get sued or something? Lol.

I know multiple people who do it but I’m kinda in that gym/fitness scene where people really care about different levels of stuff in their blood. Truthfully I think most of it’s BS but really only doctors can run those tests.

My friend in the story did it because he physically felt the impact of the cholesterol. It impacts your hormones. His QoL declined quickly so he went to the doctor to understand why.

What if you're always hitting the gym daily?

Slow news day? Or is the NY Post always this dumb? We've known for years that dietary cholesterol doesn't have any effect on blood cholesterol.

Commented above. NYP is an awful website, OP using it as a source for ~anything is telling.

Sorry, I‘m filtering ads with my pi-hole, so I simply don‘t notice these issues with websites anymore.

Not referring to simply the hosted site, only to the existence of NYP. They are an awful sensationalized, rage bait website that has a long history of making stories up. You really shouldn’t be paying any attention or traffic to them.

We is a very small subset of people. I hear this from literally >90% I talk to.

Many people I've talked to don't believe that though

Gaston over here

Conor Benn?

I ate 10 eggs a day and got a fucking allergy in two weeks.

Site is so plastered with ads it’s totally unusable. I mean who runs this and thinks it ok?

Virtually zero ads using firefox mobile... I don't know how normal people can stand surfing the web these days ..

In my experience people ~25 years of age and younger, who are not tech-savvy enough to install an adblocker, simply do not surf the web. Everything is an app, thus the internet browser becomes an online shopping (no/very few ads) and "googling" tool, though this second use is fading away as well with the rise of LLM chatbots. The ads baked into short-format content are much less obtrusive than the popups or fake download buttons of yore—though in my view this makes them even more insidious. I've witnessed my friends not even realize a video was an advertisement until they'd already watched it in full.

* Grain of salt; just the anecdotal opinion of a jaded zillenial.

It’s also a racist, clickbait, right wing website that pretends to be the TMZ of NY/US.

Don’t ever bother with anything from NYP

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