This lively child wasn’t shaking the yolk around.
Dr. Nick Nowitz, a Harvard medical student, studied the effect of a “chicken” diet on cholesterol by eating 720 eggs in one month and found that cholesterol levels dropped by about 20 percent.
Before his experiment, Nowitz’s “hypothesis” was that eating 60 dozen eggs for a month would not increase LDL (low-density lipoprotein) or “bad” cholesterol.
In a YouTube video, Nowitz said that eating 24 eggs a day, on average one every hour, would “more than five-fold your dietary cholesterol intake” and bring your monthly cholesterol intake to 133,200 milligrams.
Nowitz’s LDL levels dropped by 2 percent in the first week of the new diet, and then dramatically decreased by 18 percent over the next two weeks.
Nowolk’s normal LDL level was about 90 mg per decimeter while eating a “mixed standard American diet” before he started the keto diet.
According to Healthline, eating two eggs, or half a cup, a day was found to have no effect on blood cholesterol levels compared to a high-carb breakfast without eggs.
The study also found that people with health conditions such as diabetes who ate six to 12 eggs per week had no adverse effects on total blood cholesterol or heart disease risk factors, and actually had an increase in high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, or “good” cholesterol.
Dietary cholesterol attaches to receptors in the intestine and stimulates the release of a hormone called cholestrol, which binds to receptors in the liver and inhibits “endogenous cholesterol synthesis,” maintaining homeostasis or equilibrium.
“In lean, insulin-sensitive individuals on a low-carb diet, particularly a ketogenic diet, it’s common to see elevated LDL levels as part of the lipid ternary composition,” Nowitz explained.
The lipid triad is made up of “high LDL, high HDL and low triglycerides,” which “constitutes the metabolic signature of a rapid change from carbohydrate burning to fat burning,” he said.
Adding carbohydrates back into the diet of “thin and weight-gain respondents” can help lower LDL levels.
But Norwitts chose to eat fruits like blueberries, bananas and strawberries during the final two weeks of his diet, which led to a dramatic weight loss.
While 60 grams of net carbs per day wasn’t enough to reverse his “lean, muscle-heavy hyper-responder phenotype,” it was enough to get him “in and out” of ketosis.
“The extra carbohydrates I was eating had a bigger impact than the amount of cholesterol I was consuming,” he said.
The Oxford University doctorate holder said he consumed 75 grams (100 calories) of saturated fat and about 5,000 milligrams of dietary cholesterol per day.
The American Heart Association recommends that no more than 6 percent of your daily calories come from saturated fat.
Nowitz said his reason for undertaking this “crazy” experiment was to provide an “intellectual challenge” to the extreme messages surrounding dieting on social media.
Nowitz described it as “real food,” and used the strange meals and stories to try to get more researchers interested in and involved in metabolic health research.
