eggs good,bad,good,bad?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24332380-000-why-everything-you-know-about-nutrition-is-wrong

This piece was a welcome read. Written by a nutrition journalist. It states the reasoning for my objections to advice from nutritionists, in a more articulate form than “bloody epidemiology!”.
We have a growing obesity problem in this country and I have to admit to being part of it, taking a daily dose of about a dozen different medications, which may be related to diet, or old age, or an interaction of conflicting effects of the various drugs.
For me, the problem lies in there being no causal links between diet and health, except at a level of lack of certain minerals and vitamins cause all humans to suffer similar health issues. Eating too much makes you fat and starving makes you dead.
I’d like to see more research on how molecules in our bodies interact to do what they do.

Imagine being inside your own body, floating along with your blood cells and the multitude of molecules that also drift in the currents. There are bits of food, waste, plastic (or so, we’re told), enzymes, hormones, drugs etc., etc. They’re not on a mission to get anywhere; they’re just bumping into one another and, usually, just bouncing off again. Think of them like odd bits of jigsaw pieces, some huge and some tiny. Sometimes they’ll latch onto each other and something will happen. E.g. an enzyme will meet a starch molecule and stick to it in a couple of places, causing it to change shape. The change in shape of the enzyme causes it to break a bit off the Starch molecule, before releasing it again. It’s not an intentional act, anymore than litmus turning red in an acid environment, or turning blue, when it finds itself in an alkaline one. It’s just a mindless chemical reaction. All throughout your body, other reactions happen. Think of your cells as like a Death Star, with molecules bumping into them. Some molecules may bump into an access point and gain entry into the cell, if they have the right shape, size and identifying bits of molecular groups. They’ll float around inside the cell, where they may interact with its internal structures and provide energy, or nutrients or stimulate other molecules to form. They may just float out again. The processes are not predictable and will vary in each person, because of our DNA and maybe, even, the DNA of the plant, or animal, we’ve eaten. Infections enter our bodies and float around, inside, in the same haphazard way, as these other bits and pieces. As a group, we have a similar reaction to these invaders, which, in the case of viruses, are also mindless in how they interact with our bodies. Most of us react in the same way, to varying extents. Some die, some just become carriers of the disease. I’ve not become aware of any research on why this is so. It might help to kick epidemiology into the long grass and see, which genes are involved in combatting disease, controlling immune reactions, allowing hyperplasia and metastasis. When these are known, maybe we can develope treatments specific to an individual’s response to the same foods and diseases.

Calorie counting is stupid

I get really annoyed by TV pundits and self-styled health experts/professionals going on about the calories in food, as though Calories are little poison pills placed in various items, which we negligently shove down our throats.

Do any of them know what calories are, or even how the numbers quoted are measured?

Cast your mind back to your Physics lessons at school. A calorie is a unit of heat energy and the Calorie (capital C), the one associated with food, is actually 1000 calories.
The Scientific definition of the calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius.
So how do they measure the number of Calories in a food sample?
They use a device called a calorimeter, which burns a measured amount of food and measure how much heat is released.
The problem is that we don’t have a little furnace in our guts.
We don’t incinerate our food and turn it totally into carbon dioxide and water.

Our bodies don’t work that way.
Our bodies break foods down in specific chemical reactions. E.g. Bread tastes sweet, because we have an enzyme in our saliva, which immediately goes to work on the starch, breaking it down into sugars, which are more easily digested.

Conversely, paper is mainly cellulose, which is made from starch molecules, has a very high calorific value and will pass through our bodies unaltered.
It’s just like that other form of cellulose, beloved of nutritionists, roughage.
People eat it in brown bread and Bran cereals, because “it’s good for you”.
But our body can’t digest it.
All it does is pass through our intestines unchanged but thereby scraping the inner walls of our guts (like a scouring pad) loosening off any bits, which have stuck to them.
Those Calories don’t have any effect on you.

Consider wine.
If it’s a dry white wine, then it’s very low in sugars and its Calories are almost all alcohol.
Now, alcohol has a lot of Calories as can be seen when we flambé the Xmas pud.
However, when you drink it, you don’t belch flames.
Your body oxidises alcohol in stages.
In the first stage it’s converted into acetaldehyde.
A lot of that goes no further, because you breathe it out, as witnessed by the fact that this is what breathalyser’s measure. (I’d actually be interested to know whether any research has been done on how efficiently this is done by our varying  metabolism’s).
I don’t know the rest of the pathways possible.
The next stage would be to oxidise it to acetic acid (vinegar) and possibly onto Carbon dioxide and water; although some will sweat out.

Consider Lactulose. This is a sugar. It will not only burn but tastes the same as common sugar, yet it is used as a laxative, because our bodies can’t break it down and instead, it passes straight through like liquid paraffin, lubricating/softening solid waste “encouraging intestinal transit”.
There was a fat with a similar indigestibility, which was marketed as allowing people to eat cream cakes etc., without weight gain.
It was withdrawn because of the transit issue I.e. it caused what was politely termed anal leakage.
There needs to be better understanding of how different bodies treat different food stuffs, before we can judge what foods to eat and which to avoid.

Calorie counting is like a political truth:-  Deceitful.