Eating Eggs Helps Adults Lose More Weight

Weight Loss with Eggs

Eating eggs for breakfast as part of a reduced-calorie diet helped overweight women lose more weight and feel more energetic than those who ate a bagel breakfast.

This study confirms previous findings, published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, that when people ate eggs for breakfast they felt more satisfied and consumed fewer calories throughout the day as compared to when they had a bagel breakfast.(2)

"While it's been well-established that foods such as eggs that contain the highest quality protein help people feel full longer, we were surprised at how definite these findings were," said Nikhil V. Dhurandhar, Ph.D., lead researcher and associate professor in the department of infection and obesity at Louisiana State University's Pennington Biomedical Research Center. "The women who consumed eggs as part of their diet plan lost significantly more weight, had greater reductions in waist circumference and reported significantly higher energy levels."

Study finds weight loss greater with eggs, even when all else is equal

Specifically, the study found that overweight women who ate two eggs for breakfast at least five days a week for 8 weeks (as part of a low-fat diet with a 1,000 calorie reduction):

-- lost 65 percent more weight

-- had 83 percent greater reductions in waist circumference

-- reported greater improvements in energy levels than their dieting counterparts who consumed a bagel breakfast of the same calories (1)

In the study, the egg and bagel breakfasts not only provided the same amount of calories, but also the same weight mass, an important control factor in satiety and weight loss studies.

Eggs help healthy people stay healthy

The study also found no significant differences between the plasma total-, HDL- and LDL- cholesterol and triglyceride levels of either group, confirming what a substantial body of research has shown for years: healthy adults on a low-fat diet can enjoy eggs without significantly impacting their risk of heart disease.

Additional research presented at Experimental Biology 2007 this week further highlighted the benefits of eggs, including their role in providing choline, an essential nutrient, which is often lacking in the American diet. Notably, pregnant women and women of child-bearing age were found to have low choline intake, a concern as choline has been shown to help prevent birth defects and promote brain and memory development.

Eggs are easy to include in everyday diets

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