Egg lovers are rejoicing this week because the USDA, usually the last to notice anything resembling a genuine nutritional advance, has announced that eggs are much higher in vitamin D than previously thought, and also 14 percent lower in cholesterol than previously believed.
Leaving aside for the moment the question of how it is that scientific authorities could have been so wrong for so long about something as basic as the levels of vitamin D and cholesterol in eggs, the new numbers are happy news indeed for egg lovers. The egg industry is delighted to report that you can now eat up to 10 eggs a week and still stay under the recommended limit of 300 mg of cholesterol per day for healthy adults (provided, of course, that you consume no other cholesterol at all from any other source).
This is putting a sunny-side-up grin on the face of those who enjoy eating eggs and don't fancy eating their way to a heart attack. But if it's making egg-lovers smile, it's like mainlining Prozac for the egg industry, which as you might expect is wasting no time trumpeting the news that their products have been exonerated.
But wait a minute. There's something that's being overlooked in all the hoopla, something that might be even more important than the milligrams of cholesterol in an egg. Do we care how the hens are treated? About the kind of conditions in which they live, and the quality of the food they are fed? Do we care if the eggs are produced humanely and sustainably? If the new dietary information means we'll be eating more eggs that come from sick hens who live in abject misery, is this such a good thing?
As I wrote in "The Food Revolution", the sad fact of modern industrialized egg production is that layer hens are crammed together in filthy cages so small that the birds are not able to lift a single wing. The amount of space the birds are given is less than they would have if you stuffed several of them into a file drawer. One building will frequently house 30,000 hens packed together under these grotesquely crowded and seriously unhealthy conditions.
The birds are driven so insane by these miserable conditions that they would peck each other to death if they could. The industry, of course, doesn't want to see such a thing happen, because there's no profit to be made from dead hens who don't lay eggs. How, then, does the industry prevent it? Not by giving the hens more room, which would be the humane response, but by cutting off a sizable part of the hens' beaks, a process known euphemistically as "beak trimming."
What's a concerned consumer to do? Fortunately, the Cornucopia Institute has come out with an "Organic Egg Scorecard" that empowers consumers with accurate information. The scorecard rates companies that sell name-brand and private-label organic eggs, according to the criteria that are most important to the majority of conscientious consumers.
There are two things the Organic Egg Scorecard quickly makes apparent.
The first is that just because eggs are "organic" doesn't mean they are humanely raised. In fact, there are "organic" factory farm operations with more than 80,000 "organic" hens in a single building.
The second thing the Organic Egg Scorecard reveals is exactly which brands of eggs found in your local stores are produced using the best organic practices and with the most ethical regard for the hens. If you are interested in which eggs are sustainable and humane, and which are not, check it out.
The results may surprise you. For example, the private label brands sold by Trader Joe's, Safeway O Organics, Whole Foods 365 Organic, WalMart's Great Value and Costco's Kirkland Signature, get the lowest possible rating. This is because these companies were unable or unwilling to provide any meaningful information about how their chickens are housed, fed or treated. Unfortunately, reports the Cornucopia Institute, "the vast majority of organic eggs for private label brands are produced on industrial farms that house hundreds of thousands of birds and do not grant the birds meaningful outdoor access."
Many egg suppliers tout that their eggs are produced without hormones. That sounds great but is in fact meaningless, because unlike beef and dairy products, no eggs produced in the U.S. today are legally produced with hormones. Federal regulations prohibit the use of hormones in raising poultry.
Whole Foods, at least, has taken a step in the right direction by not selling any eggs that come from hens whose beaks have been "trimmed." Whole Foods shoppers can take a modicum of comfort in knowing that eggs bought there do not come from the worst of the nation's egg factories.
If you want the eggs from healthy and happy hens, you might want to take a step in the direction of food self-reliance and keep a few hens in your backyard. Or get your eggs from a neighbor or from a small-scale farm you can actually visit. Or purchase only those eggs which are highly rated by the Organic Egg Scorecard.
Personally, my favorite breakfast is guaranteed to be cruelty-free. It's oatmeal, with cinnamon, raisins and walnuts, which aren't added only for flavor. Oats are a comparatively low-glycemic index grain to begin with, but the addition of walnuts creates a nourishing breakfast with high protein content, high nutrient density, a healthy form of fat, and a very low glycemic index.
Here's my recipe for a tasty and hearty breakfast that will provide you with consistent blood sugar levels, and give you plenty of energy all morning. Serves three.
1 cup rolled oats
3 cups water
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/3 cup raisins
1/3 cup walnuts
1. Place oats, water, salt, cinnamon and raisins in a covered saucepan and bring to a boil.
2. Turn down heat and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
3. Remove from heat, stir in walnuts and serve hot.
John Robbins is the author of many bestsellers including "The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World," the classic "Diet For A New America," and "The New Good Life: Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less." He is the recipient of the Rachel Carson Award, the Albert Schweitzer Humanitarian Award, the Peace Abbey's Courage of Conscience Award, and Green America's Lifetime Achievement Award. To learn more about his work, visit here.
Follow John Robbins on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johnrobbinsnow
Wayne Pacelle: Landmark Agreement to Help Millions of Hens
Rabbi Jill Jacobs: Rotten Tomatoes: Trader Joe's and the Jewish Ethic for Farmworker Justice
Cruelty to animals - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pet-Abuse.Com - Animal Cruelty
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA): The animal ...
USDA says eggs now have less cholesterol, more vitamin D - latimes.com
David Katz, M.D.: USDA: Eggs' Cholesterol Lower Than Thought ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEkc70ztOrc
Regarding Cholesterol.... it is so necessary that every cell can make it. If you don't eat cholesterol, your body may overproduce it. (Swartzbein Solution... great book for diabetes)
Unless you raise chickens yourself, or know someone who does, and know for a FACT exactly how the birds were raised and how they were treated, the simplest way to avoid the cruelty that is routinely included as a "bonus" with your carton of eggs, your omelette, your sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit, or your egg-containing packaged foods is not to purchase those products in the first place.
I won't go so far as to take the radical view that being a vegan is the ONLY way to avoid supporting deliberate animal cruelty, but for most people in today's society it's probably the most straightforward. I'm not going to denigrate the backyard chicken movement, though, because it shows that people do at least care, and ARE trying to make a difference.
What I find disheartening is that these issues, even today, don't seem to be a very high priority for most people - judging not by their words, but by their actions. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone in this country who is not bothered by cruelty to animals. Yet we are so far removed these days from our food production system, that even people who would be the first to call the animal cops if they witnessed their neighbor abusing a dog or cat, will fail to consider, when they visit the store or restaurant for that sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit, the tail-docking, the beak-clipping, the battery cages, the gestation crates, the male calves of dairy cows being sent to the veal crates, the male chicks of laying hens being ground up alive on assembly lines, or the manure lagoons poisoning the environments of entire human communities; all they see is . . . breakfast.
Back in 2007, I joined thousands of concerned Californians to gather signatures for the Humane Farming Initiative, created to improve living conditions for confined laying hens. Thankfully, the effort was successful and egg-producers must now house chickens in cages large enough so they can lie down, flap their wings and turn around. It is incomprehensible that we needed to "force" human beings to provide such basic conditions. Millions of chickens endure cruelty every second of their pathetic lives. How can this be called "acceptable agricultural practice"?
We speak of compassion and regard for human life but what stunning disconnect occurs that prevents us from caring about creatures who are completely at our mercy? Do we come equipped with a toggle switch that we flip on and off at will, based solely the being before us? I don't think so. Nobel Peace Prize winner, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, encouraged us to develop a "reverence for all life", for surely if we come to the belief that we have the right to choose what being is worthless, we arrive also at the idea of worthless human lives.
The disregard for animal suffering expressed here, couched frequently in flippant and repulsive humor, speaks volumes to how far we are from being worthy of the description--conscious, enlightened beings.