The Incredible, Edible, Easter Egg

Happy Easter!

Two Christian legends that are not necessarily in conflict trace the origin of the Easter egg to Mary Magdalene.

One holds that she had a basket of eggs that miraculously turned blood red while she was waiting with other women at the tomb of Jesus as he arose from the dead.

The other holds that after Jesus’s ascension into heaven she greeted the emperor with “Christ is risen!” He then pointed to an egg on his table and said, “Christ is no more risen than this egg is red,” after which the egg immediately turned red.

While Easter eggs are often dyed many colors as if an array of spring flowers, in the East they are simply dyed red using vinegar and onion skins in commemoration of the blood Jesus shed on the cross.

Various Slavic traditions add more ornate patterns over the red foundation or use multi-colored artwork.

The Easter egg evokes various imagery associated both with the Christian story and with spring. For example, new life emerges from an egg, which is like an external womb, whereas Jesus arose with new life from the womb of the earth. Christians also gave up eggs for Lent and could finally eat them on Easter. More broadly, in temperate environments chickens stop laying eggs in winter as they recuperate their nutrient and energy stores and start laying them again in the spring, which coincides with Easter.

In most of the world, these are Paschal eggs. “Pascha” is the Latin and Greek derivation of the Hebrew Pesach and ties the blood Jesus shed on the cross to the blood of the Passover lamb.

“Easter,” according to the eighth century English monk Bede, is tied to an ancient goddess of that name, though nothing survives before Bede supporting this. It does have etymological roots with east as a direction, which itself is associated with the sun arising from nightly sleep. It has at least a curiously coincidental surface similarity to the name of the Biblical Jewish queen Ester. Roger Seheult has been collecting some striking similarities between her story and that of the Easter story.

Billions of people will be eating, gifting, or otherwise engaging with Easter eggs today.

About 250 million people will wait until next week, due to the use of an older and less frequently self-correcting approximation of the date of the Paschal full moon.

In honor of the Easter Egg, here are the top five insights about eggs from my 2+ decades of research into nutrition:

Boiled Eggs Are Supercharged with Biotin

Biotin prevents brain fog, supports healthy hair, skin, and nails, stabilizes blood sugar, normalizes cholesterol levels, and supports healthy pregnancies.

About one in thirty people have genetic mutations normalized by high doses of biotin.

All of the biotin is in the yolk.

The egg white, by contrast, ties up the biotin and makes it unusable.

The simplest way to render the egg white completely harmless in this respect is to boil it for four minutes or more.

Three Nutrients Where Eggs Really Shine

While liver is the king of all superfoods, eggs are the picky eater’s general superfood, and both of these really stand out as sources of biotin, choline, and arachidonic acid.

While we covered biotin above, choline and arachidonic acid are no less important.

A livestreamed 2010 USDA committee deliberating the then-upcoming dietary guidelines referred to “The Choline Problem.”

That is, USDA maintains that eggs are bad for you, but all of the data say people need more choline. Thus, “The Choline Problem” is the fact that everyone needs more choline and less eggs, but eggs are by far and away the top source of choline that modern Americans would actually want to eat.

Fatty liver runs rampant, and choline matters more to fatty liver than sugar, alcohol, or fat. In fact, get enough choline in your diet and nothing else will be able to give you fatty liver.

Saturated fat raises the need for choline: it is the ratio of choline to saturated fat that determines how much fat our livers fill up with if we eat foods like butter and cream.

The choline-to-saturated fat ratio is probably important to heart disease as well: recent research on “LDL aggregation” suggests that a high ratio prevents LDL particles from clumping up and contributing to atherosclerotic plaque.

Choline is incredibly important to methylation, being able to keep this process running even if you have that darn MTHFR gene. Methylation prevents us from ruminating too much and makes us mentally flexible, neutralizes our allergies, and pumps our muscles full of creatine.

Choline is used to support cell membranes and make our bile flow smoothly.

Choline is used to make the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which cools inflammation, helps us rest and digest by activating our parasympathetic nervous system, and in our brains it supports learning, memory, and sustained, focused attention.

Arachidonic acid needs go up when we grow, get pregnant, heal from injuries, or start building muscle.

We use it to power our brains, to waterproof the skin, to prevent food allergies and intolerances, and to attack foreign invaders whenever we start getting sick. Waterproofing the skin is critical to the prevention of eczema, and helps keep you maximally moisturized.

Choline Without the TMAO

Some people are concerned that a compound made from choline in the gut, trimethylamine, and the product we make from that in our liver, trimethylamine oxide (TMAO), contributes to heart disease.

While I am not convinced of this, the form of choline found in eggs is the least likely to generate TMAO in the gut. If you’re worried about this, reach for the egg before the choline supplement.

A Folate Superfood?

The best sources of folate are liver, legumes, and leafy greens.

While we need more data, some analyses suggest that eggs from chickens raised on pasture, who eat leafy greens (grass) all day long, are incredibly high in folate.

The Incredible, Edible Egg Yolk

While boiling your egg can make the entire egg a powerhouse of nutritional value, if you have to throw something away it should be the white, not the yolk.

The yolk contains all of the arachidonic acid, choline, and biotin, as well as 100% of the carotenoids, vitamins A, E, D, and K (8 items). The white does not contain 100% of any nutrient.

The yolk contains more than 90% of the calcium, iron, phosphorus, zinc, thiamin, B6, folate, and B12, and 89% of the panthothenic acid (9 items). The white does not contain more than 90% of any nutrient, but contains over 80% of the magnesium, sodium, and niacin (3 items).

The yolk contains between 50% and 80% of the copper, manganese, and selenium, while the white contains between 50% and 80% of the potassium, riboflavin, and protein.

If you aren’t going to fully cook the white, you are probably better off throwing it out, and if you are going to throw out one or the other, your vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids will be best off throwing out the white.

But, boil that white for four minutes or longer and you’re good to go on all the nutrients.

Happy Easter!

With that, enjoy your Easter Eggs, and Happy Easter!