Eggstraordinary: What Happened to His Body After Eating 700 Eggs in One Month
It seems that trendy diets and strict rules regarding food consumption are the rage these days.
Most people have a specific goal in mind when deciding to drastically change their eating habits. Maybe it’s to gain or lose weight, maybe it’s to live healthier, maybe it’s just because their morals don’t align with the diet they’re currently following.
I think we can confidently say that most of us have chosen to eliminate certain things from our diet in the past. I also think few of us have taken on as big a challenge as Dr. Nick Norwitz.
Dr. Norwitz, a researcher-educator whose website describes his mission as “Mainstreaming Metabolic Health,” recently gained internet fame through his YouTube channel, where he documented his journey after deciding to eat 700 eggs a month to see what would happen to his body.
That’s right… 700 eggs! For those wondering, that amounts to two boxes of eggs a day for 30 days. Or, as the doctor puts it, one egg per hour. A challenge not for the faint of heart, we can probably agree on that.
To reach the required amounts, Dr. Norwitz had to consume a whopping 24 eggs a day. His reason for what most of us would likely describe as a daunting and extreme nutritional regimen? He wanted to prove his hypothesis that such an extreme intake of cholesterol-rich eggs would not have a significant effect on his cholesterol levels, particularly his LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol.
Cholesterol is likely a term you’ve heard of, which almost everyone believes poses risks to the heart if cholesterol levels are constantly high.
When I was young, we were taught that cholesterol was undeniably bad for you and that daily consumption of cholesterol-rich foods would set someone on a path to big problems in the future.
24 eggs per day
Times change, of course, as does the general consensus of health experts. Nowadays, there are people who claim that cholesterol is not as dangerous as it was once believed to be. Since I’m not a doctor, I won’t tell you here that it’s fine to eat 24 eggs a day (please don’t try it at home), but to be fair to Dr. Norwitz, his experiment revealed some interesting data.
According to the doctor’s YouTube channel, his cholesterol levels did not show the expected spike after consuming a whopping 720 eggs in just one month.
Instead, he claimed to have observed the opposite – his LDL cholesterol levels not only remained stable but gradually decreased. In the first two weeks, Dr. Norwitz’s LDL cholesterol level dropped by two percent, but in the two weeks that followed, it would decrease by 18 percent.
Dr. Norwitz delved into the science behind the results and explained that the regulation of cholesterol synthesis by the liver is influenced by food intake, and that after adding extra carbohydrates to his diet, his LDL levels seemed to balance out.
“The extra dose of carbohydrates overwhelmed the insane amounts of cholesterol I was consuming,” he explained according to the New York Post.
Norwitz then chose fruits like blueberries, bananas, and strawberries to eat in the final two weeks of his experiment, resulting in the dramatic decrease mentioned earlier.
Have you ever taken on a crazy food challenge or tried a new diet? Let us know in the comments.
