Dr Nick Norwitz took on the challenge of eating 720 eggs in a month to see if the age-old belief that too many eggs are bad for your cholesterol is actually true
A man ate 24 eggs a day for a whole month to see what would happen to his body – and the findings came as a surprise to many.
Nick Norwitz, a doctorate student at Harvard University, gave himself the challenge of eating a monumental 720 eggs in four weeks to track how it would impact his cholesterol levels. It’s long been believed that too many eggs are bad for you, and that they can raise your cholesterol levels and cause heart problems.
But in recent years, this has been disputed. Dr Norwitz was convinced his low-density lipoprotein (LDL) levels – considered to be ‘bad cholesterol’ – would actually drop if he ate the equivalent of one egg every hour of the day for a month. So, he took on a food experiment to find out.
Dr Norwitz, who has a PhD in human brain metabolism from the University of Oxford, posted his results on YouTube and the video has been viewed a whopping 170,000 times. Revealing his diet plan, he showed an image of more than 40 cardboard egg boxes stacked up in his room that he’d collected during the experiment.
He didn’t state what other foods he ate beside eggs, nor what his daily exercise routine was. But he did say that after the first two weeks, he also started eating 60 grams of carbohydrates a day – the equivalent of two bananas or 21 ounces of blueberries. Dr Norwitz explained how this can help to further reduce cholesterol levels.
Sharing his findings, Dr Norwitz said: “I hypothesized that eating 720 eggs in one month, which alone amounts to 133,200mg of cholesterol, would not increase my cholesterol. Specifically, it would not increase my LDL cholesterol. And, indeed, it didn’t, not a smidge. Even though my dietary intake of cholesterol more than quintupled, my LDL cholesterol actually dropped.”
Many scientists and doctors have previously warned that eating eggs may cause a surge in LDL levels and raise the risk of health complications, because cholesterol can build up as plaque in the arteries and increase the likeliness of heart disease and stroke. But Dr Norwitz found that his LDL levels fell by 18 percent after the month-long experiment.
According to some scientists, this could be due to the release of a hormone called cholesin, trigged by cholestrol binding to receptors on gut cells, which signals to the liver to produce less LDL. Dr Norwitz was praised for his research in the comments section of the video, with many sharing how they can “get behind eating more eggs”.
One viewer wrote: “I clicked because I knew that your LDL would not increase and I want share this video with some of family that freaks out that I am eating all these eggs and meat!” Another commented: “I’ve eaten eggs almost every day of my 67 years, through all the good/bad, never gave them up. And I’m in very good health, no doctors, no meds.”
