Egg Whites v/s. Whole Eggs

I was invited for breakfast at a friend’s place recently. The spread seemed quite healthy, complete with oatmeal, cold-cuts, regional specialities, fruits and an Egg-Counter as well where you were being served eggs as per your liking. Lots of my friend and their kids were swarming the Egg-Counter getting various kinds of omelettes, scrambled eggs and egg-fry made. Some with cheese, some with herbs and spices while only a couple of them preferred to ask for the ‘Sunny-side-up’. But one peculiar thing I noticed was that most of them, even kids were choosing the ‘egg-white only’ option and I wondered why?!

So, the next person in line who asked for “Only the egg-white, please!” was my target. I asked him what made him discard the yolk, to which he exclaimed, “Oh the egg-yolks are terrible…they mess with your heart!” On probing further, I realised he was badly misinformed to think that the egg-yolk is the wort part of an egg – loaded with fats and deadly cholesterol. But to be honest, it is the egg-yolk where all the lovely nutrition is!

Misinformation and misunderstandings regarding nutrition get passed down from parents to their teens and that’s the reason most youngsters at the breakfast table preferred the egg-white option. By blindly discarding the egg-yolk, the most nutrient dense, antioxidant-rich, vitamin and mineral loaded portion of the egg gets wasted. The yolks are rich in healthy omega-3 fatty acids, fat soluble vitamins and trace minerals and essential fatty acids (EFAs). Along with all these, more than ninety percent of the egg’s calcium, iron and phosphorus are lost along with folate and zinc. Even the protein in egg whites isn’t as powerful without the yolks to balance out the amino acid profile.

The reality is, by consuming eggs, which are rich in dietary cholesterol, our body tries to balance things out by bringing down its internal production of cholesterol. Thus, the assumption that consuming whole eggs skyrockets our cholesterol is a myth! While the fact is, if we don’t consume enough cholesterol, our body produces more than is essential for our good health. It should also be noted that eating whole eggs helps in raising our HDL, High Density Lipoproteins or ‘Good Cholesterol’ to a higher degree than LDL, Low-Density Lipoproteins, which is the ‘Bad Cholesterol’, thereby improving our overall cholesterol ratio and blood chemistry.

Another fact is that although egg yolks do contain more calories than egg whites, these calories have a high micro-nutrient density which helps regulate our appetite, owing to which we land up consuming less calories overall.

So now, I hope we all agree that whole eggs are not some evil food that will wreck our health and body and we also realise that consuming whole eggs is FAR MORE healthier than just egg whites.

It’s time we stopped this silliness of eating an omelette whisked out of 2-3 egg whites and throwing away the egg yolks. If real taste along with nutrition is what we want then we must relish and serve whole eggs with their delicious nutrient-dense yolks to our kids and families.