GREATER JOLIET AREA YMCA

Eggcelent News

Eggs have a lot going for them. Their versatility is amazing—they can be scrambled, fried, poached, or even made ahead into grab-and-go mini frittatas (recipe below!). They play well at every meal, from the obvious choices at breakfast, to hardboiled eggs on a lunchtime salad, to a light but satisfying veggie-packed frittata for dinner.

Packed with protein, vitamins, minerals, and healthy fats, eggs may be the most perfect food—except for one little problem.

Cholesterol.

Each egg contains about 190 milligrams of cholesterol, whereas the recommended daily intake is only 300 milligrams. However, it turns out the science and reasoning behind that recommendation is flawed. Once, researchers thought that the more cholesterol you eat, the more you’d have in your body. More recently studies, however, find little correlation between dietary and body cholesterol.

Of course, many egg lovers get around the cholesterol problem by tossing the yolks. However, science agrees that in healthy people, eating up to three whole eggs per day is totally safe. So eat the whole egg!

Other than packing all that cholesterol, the yolks contain most of the vitamins, minerals and fats. These fats are the healthy omega-3 kind, and many farmers supplement the hens’ diets with omega-3 oils to produce eggs with even higher levels of these brain-boosting fats. Beyond that, the yolks just taste good and make your meal even more satisfying.

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Ditching Diet Soda

If you’re still drinking diet soda as a healthier alternative to regular sodas or other sweetened beverages, it’s time to stop. Instinctively, we think that in order to control our weight, it’s smarter to drink a zero-calorie diet soda instead of a regular soda with hundreds of calories of pure sugar. However, scientific research has shown that this untrue for decades. Clearly the soda manufacturers have been very successful in their advertising campaigns.

Your weight is a result of far more than a simple calories-in-calories-out equation. Underlying and unconscious drives determine what you eat far more than you might realize. Artificial sweeteners play all sorts of tricks on your body’s chemistry, making it much more detrimental to your health than the real stuff.

First off, sweet tastes—artificial or natural—increase appetite. When you drink a diet soda, your body recognizes the sweet taste and responds with this appetite increase. However, the part of your brain that derives satisfaction from food is unaware of the diet soda. This results in a disconnect: one part of your brain responds to the sweetness, but another part is unaware of it because there is not actually any nutrition in it. Our brains and bodies are not happy with imbalances, and strive to correct them. In this case, they strive to correct it by increasing your appetite further so you get the food to make the food-satisfaction pathways in your brain happy. Put simply, your brain recognizes the sweet taste but doesn’t find any food, so compels you to get the food it expected to find.

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