Are eggs the best muscle building food?

Are eggs the best muscle building food?

The term superfood gets thrown around a lot, but of all the supposed superfoods out there. There probably isn’t a more controversial one than eggs.

One year eggs will help us build muscle and lose weight like no other food the next year a study comes out and says eggs are going to kill us and consuming them is worse than smoking. There has even been a recent attempt to show how eating enough eggs might have a similar effect to taking a steroid cycle.

Today we are going to cut through all the myths about eggs to find out whether or not they should be in our diet. And do they aid in building muscle especially for a man over fifty as they are not only high in protein, but also high in fats and cholesterol.

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As we age our ability to absorb protein diminishes and we end up using less and less of the protein we ingest. This creates a challenge when it comes to building muscle. In this area, eggs can help as they are the most bio-available or most easily absorbed whole food source of protein with a nearly perfect amino acid profile matching up to exactly what the human body needs.

When it comes to preparing an egg to get the most out of it nutritionally it gets a bit more interesting. Most of the protein is contained in the egg white and from a purely digestible standpoint cooking an egg breaks down the protein making it more easily absorbed by the body, but when it comes to the rest of the nutrition which is mainly in the yoke it is damaged slightly by the cooking process. I may be splitting hairs here a little bit, but that would make a soft boiled egg slightly better than a hard-boiled egg.

If most of the protein is in the egg white, why wouldn’t we just have egg whites? Well they did a study on experienced lifters and they split them into 2 groups one group had scrambled egg whites post-workout and the other group had whole eggs scrambled. each group received an equal amount of protein. What they found was the group that had the whole eggs had a greater stimulation of protein synthesis which is the process of repairing and building new muscle in response to intense exercise.

Now, what about this notion that if you eat enough eggs every day it would just be like doing a steroid cycle? There is no testosterone in eggs, but there are some notable components in eggs known to help optimize our own testosterone levels. And that is fatty acids, vitamin D and cholesterol.

Now there really isn’t enough vitamin D in an egg to have a huge effect on the body. With only 40 to 45 IU’s in an egg and study’s showing increased testosterone with supplementation of close to 4000 IU’s per day.

I want to mention balanced dieting. When we are deficient in something fixing that deficiency will improve our health and performance. But overeating one macronutrient and neglecting another isn’t going to optimize your health or personal performance. The dietary guidelines no longer give an upper limit for fats, but the old guideline was that they should be about 20 to 35% of your diet and this is a reasonable range. So if you were to eat 2,000 calories a day and 30% of your diet was fats that would work out to almost 67 grams of fat. A large egg has about 5 grams of fats.

https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/106/6/1401/4823156
https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/article/62/10/1164/568431
https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/134/1/187/4688284

I found an interesting study that was done on older lifters between the ages of 60 and 69 and what they found was a connection between dietary cholesterol and increases in lean muscle mass from weight training. They also found over the course of this 12-week study that there was no connection between increased dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol levels.

Cholesterol is a required component in the chain of events that happens in our bodies when we make testosterone. This is where the controversy with eggs comes in as they are high in cholesterol containing almost 190 mg of cholesterol. The daily recommendation is only 300 mg. There is an overwhelming number of studies now showing that dietary cholesterol does not affect blood cholesterol. So, this should not be a concern in healthy men.