The Informational Cascade and the Egg-White Omelette
There's a new book out about diet, and it apparently says what I've known all my life -- protein is good for you, carbohydrates are bad, and fat is highly overrated as a dangerous substance. Well, it's about time. As my mother used to say, you can never have too much butter. This is how we cook steak in our house: first you cook the steak. Then you throw a huge pat of butter on top of it. That's it. And by the way, I'm not talking about sweet butter, I'm talking about salted butter.
Here's another thing it says in this book: dietary cholesterol has nothing whatsoever to do with your cholesterol count. This is another thing I've known all my life, which is why you will not find me lying on my deathbed regretting not having eaten enough chopped liver. Let me explain this: you can eat all sorts of things that are high in dietary cholesterol (like lobster and cheese and eggs) and they have NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on your cholesterol count. NONE. WHATSOEVER. DID YOU HEAR ME? I'm sorry to have to resort to capital letters, but what is wrong with you people?
Which brings me to the point of this piece: the egg-white omelette. I have friends who eat egg-white omelettes. Every time I'm forced to watch them eat egg-white omelettes, I feel bad for them. In the first place, egg-white omelettes are tasteless. In the second place, the people who eat them think they are doing something virtuous when they are instead merely misinformed. Sometimes I try to explain that what they're doing makes no sense, but they pay no attention to me because they have all been told to avoid dietary cholesterol by their doctors. According to yesterday's New York Times, the doctors are not deliberately misinforming their patients; instead, they're participants in something known as an informational cascade, which turns out to be a fabulous expression for something that everyone thinks must be true because so many reputable people say it is. In this case, of course, it's not an informational cascade but a misinformational cascade, and as a result, way too many people I know have been brainwashed into thinking that whole-egg omelettes are bad for you.
So this is my moment to say what's been in my heart for years: it's time to put a halt to the egg-white omelette. I don't want to confuse this with something actually important, like the war in Iraq, which it's also time to put a halt to, but I don't seem be able to do anything about Iraq, whereas I have a shot at cutting down consumption of the egg-white omelette, especially with the wind of this new book in my sails. (The book is called Good Calories, Bad Calories, and it's written by Gary Taubes.)
You don't make an omelette by taking out the yolks. You make one by putting in additional yolks. A really great omelette has two whole eggs and and one extra yolk, and by the way, the same thing goes for scrambled eggs. As for egg salad, here's our recipe: boil 18 eggs, peel them, send six of the egg whites to friends in California who persist in thinking that egg whites matter in any way. Chop the remaining 12 eggs and six yolks coarsely with a knife, and add Hellman's mayonnaise and salt and pepper to taste.
Loading comments…
Want to reply to a comment? Hint: Click "Reply" at the bottom of the comment; after being approved your comment will appear directly underneath the comment you replied to
Very close on that egg salad recipe, but anyone from the south knows you use Dukes Mayonnaise. It is the only mayonnaise worth eating. :)
I'm going to buy that book.
Talk about confusion. Why doesn't some scientist win the Nobel Prize by inventing the perfect diet? Full of taste, flavor, loads of food prepared well, this diet would of course maintain weight not increase weight.
I make my egg-white omelettes with one egg yolk, loads of cheese and veggies. Both worlds combine in my plate. This adds to my well-being and my family and friends.
I do hate white bread. I love rye, pumpernickel and black bread from the old countries. I cry when I see the "new" bagel which is complete goo with flavors.
Love ya - I am a fan of yours.
I appreciate your CAPS.
Smart move with the butter on your steak, too. We need saturated fat to take up so many of the vitamins foods hold it's no wonder the population is sick and under-nourished with its ongoing misguided faith in overly processed seed oils.
I changed my diet just 3 or 4 years ago and am sorry I wasted so much time on tasteless, thin food. The first time I put butter on green beans, my body's reaction was noticeable, as it said, "YES, this is what food is supposed to taste like!" - because I'm old enough to remember when food tasted good.
Doctors misleading patients on cholesterol? I suspect they no longer know how vital it is for our bodies to function normally.
It was about ten years ago, after my cat got type 2 diabetes, that I realized everything I had been told about what is healthy to feed my pets (specifically kibble) is all wrong. I learned that cats shouldn't eat any grains at all. It took another five years for me to undo all my learning about human nutrition and realize many of the same principles I had learned about feeding dogs and cats an evolutionary based diet apply to humans. We spent most of our evolution as hunter gatherers and 10,000 years at most as an agricultural society, not nearly enough time evolutionarily for our bodies to catch up.
Here is a crazy concept to me:
If you knew that science, in the 1950's, had duplicated plaque building up in an artery to the point of total occlusion in three months, with a substance your body produces on its own, you would think that all this time we would be warned about this substance. You think this is cholesterol?
No.
It is insulin - what your body produces when you eat too much sugar or carbohydrates in one sitting. Drip insulin directly into the femoral artery and it will totally occlude in three months. Just look at all the diseases that occur with type 2 diabetes and know this is somehow related to too much insulin in the body, now not able to do its job because the body does not respond to it anymore.
Then learn other things like triglyceride levels are directly related to blood insulin levels, drop your average insulin in your blood and triglycerides will follow.
Here's another one, cholesterol profiles also become better with people who eat lower carbohydrate diets. There was a study that eating eggs can lower your cholesterol levels.
We learn that teenagers now have arteries that look like those of middle age folks. It is not lunch meat that is doing it.
I wonder how long it will take for the nutritional paradigm - that we have been taught since lawyers for the grain industry crafted our first food pyramid - to shift.
We had a similar experience with kibble and our cat. When we took him in for his kitten checkup, the vet told us that she gives her own cat canned cat food only on (get this) CHRISTMAS Eve...the rest of the time it makes do with kibble.
We felt guilty while we continued to feed ours a mixed diet of kibble and canned food, and ,when he developed chronic constipation and blockages that almost killed him, we blamed ourselves for not following the vet's advice.
NOW, a week after the latest episode and thirteen hundred bucks poorer, we have been told the whole thinking on cat diet has changed, and the theory is that now cats and dogs ought to be eating what they would eat in the wild (vermin?). Some wily petfood manufacturer is bringing out a version of THAT kind of natural food at a price higher than for human food. At the same time there is a new kind of digestion-problems kibble that goes for 10 bucks for a little bag. It is almost impossible to know what to do. And the cat would be better off eating MICE, forgawdssakes!
Thank God our kids are grown up enough to fool around with their own diets and seek their own advice. I am flummoxed!
Linus Pauling said the dietary culprit was SUGAR and not fat, that people blamed fat because so often it appears in conjunction with sugar. And how long did Pauling live (all the while sharp as a tack)? I think he was either 93 or 94 when he died.
Yes, your cat would be better off eating mice. Now, just try to duplicate that in your cat's diet and you will be feeding him the perfect food. Believe it or not, you can buy frozen mice (!!), but usually only a mother cat can teach a cat to eat whole prey - that is why only barn (feral) cats normally eat the mice they kill. Try for a wet food that has as little grains as possible. There are also raw cat food recipes you can find on the web but you have to follow them exactly with all the proper supplements, especially taurine - interestingly mice are higher in taurine than most meats.
Now with my dogs, I do feed them raw meat and bones, and have been doing it for ten years. Tonight they ate raw turkey necks for dinner and had liver, veggies and raw chicken wings for lunch.
If you want to research it google, "BARF (bones and raw foods) for cats".
Chicken is the nearest thing to mouse meat. The wing is perfect. I only feed my cat chicken cat food or just chicken meat and he likes it raw. He is 13 years old.
If you look at the cholesterol differences between "red" meat and "white" meat, they are very small. What is most different is the fat content and the types of fats.
All this is reminding me of that bit of dialogue in Woody Allen's 1973 classic "Sleepers".
"Dr. Melik: This morning for breakfast he requested something called "wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk."
Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or... hot fudge?
Dr. Aragon: Those were thought to be unhealthy... precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik: Incredible."
Your butter terms are a little incorrect.
Sweet butter today refers to "Sweet cream butter" as opposed to butter made from soured milk. "Commercial" butter today is all sweet cream butter. Unsalted "commercial" butter is "Unsalted sweet cream butter". Soured cream butter is usually called "farmhouse" or "lactic" butter. While "sweet" is often used to refer to unsalted butter - it is incorrect.
But it's all good.........
Well, I guess the "yolk" is on us.
Nora I just LOVE you. I'm so glad to see you back on HuffPo. Not to get political about omelettes, but I thought maybe you were boycotting because of all the Hillary/Edwards bashing here. Well that seems to have died down a little and just today I was wondering when we would get to laugh at your wonderful witty insight again. Welcome back and thanks for making my day.
Avocados have fat but absolutely NO! cholesterol...cholesterol is only found in foods that come from animals.
Yay!
I was a chef for many years and put up with the mediocre pay and long hard hours because I have a passion for delicious, well prepared food.
It ceased being fun when macro neurotic, fear mongering, fatophobic, weenies began to frequent our establishment requesting such crap as egg white omelettes, and having us alter great entrees so that they became steamed, no flour, no dairy, no spice, pick the onions out, good stuff on the side, and then sending the crap back because it was too bland.
Anyway, call the egg white omelette the straw that broke my back, and if you ever would like a buttery bacon, spinach, scallion and Jarlsberg omelette slightly runny in the middle I would love to make you one.
Thanks for making my mouth water!
With your history, I bet you were never fooled by the pretend-chefs in the TV ad for 'Promise' or what ever food like product those 'chefs' rave about.
Avocados do not contain cholesterol.
I'm embarrassed for Ms. Ephron; here she is, publishing a column about cholesterol, and she doesn't even know that nutritionally significant amounts of cholesterol are found only in animal products.
And I am embarrassed for you!
Kitty Kaufman
The important thing is moderation.
I, for one, want a lot of it.
The cholesterol fallacy continues. The other day my doctor told me that my cholesterol is too high (190!) and that I needed to go on the medication to reduce it. I told her that was nonsense. She said, oh no - it's not nonsense - people with high cholesterol are at risk for Alzheimer's disease! So now they are moving from heart attacks to AD because they have failed, for years now, to connect high cholesterol to heart attacks. The drug companies have really done a good job convincing doctors to sell their products, haven't they?
High serum cholesterol is still linked to many diseases. It is the dietary relationship to serum cholesterol that has been shown to have little effect on life span.
Actually that's rather interesting- another commenter stated that insulin is related to artery blockage, and high levels of insulin correspond to high levels of cholesterol.
I just read an article about how insulin is now being tied to Alzheimer's disease.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/02/0350258
"Insulin, it turns out, may be as important for the mind as it is for the body. Research in the last few years has raised the possibility that Alzheimer's memory loss could be due to a novel third form of diabetes. Scientists at Northwestern University have discovered why brain insulin signaling — crucial for memory formation — would stop working in Alzheimer's disease."
Interesting how it all ties together!
Actually, people with LOW cholesterol are at risk for Alzheimers:
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/?p=968
While you're taking out the egg-white omelette, please include zucchini bread. Many years ago when tupperware parties were in fashion I think in the 70s, people who could bake started trotting out zuccini bread. Mostly this was done at the time you were expecting chocolate layer cake or fruit pie with whipped cream. It was disappointing and a bad brownish color.
This led to the carrot cake explosion which may have carried over into the 80s. ( Not my eighties.) Carrot cake was hailed even more than zucchini bread. Sometimes it was brought out in a tupperware container. If there is enough sugar in carrot cake and the icing is made with cream cheese and sugar, you can nearly convince yourself you're having a real dessert. Still, it is a letdown. Carrots.
Who was it that thought serving vegetables in cake form is dessert?
Whether it's lunch or dinner, if I eat all my vegetables I don't want more vegetables for dessert. It doesn't matter whether you hide them in cake, bread, or ice cream format. Enough is enough. What I want is chocolate.
Egg-white omelettes really bite.
I love zucchini bread and carrot cake! Tell you what, I'll eat your zucchini bread and carrot cake and you can eat all the peas I pick out of my Chinese food! ;-)
Zucchini bread is delicious, and so is carrot cake, which must have at least an inch of cream cheese icing on top. Besides, zucchini is a fruit.(grows from a flower)
For some reason every piece of tupperware I ever bought ended up out in the yard.
Apparently, Mrs. Jerry Seinfeld just brought out a recipe for making kid-edible food, including desserts, out of stuff like veggies. Isn't her husband the original "egg-white omlet" guy?
Sorry...meant to say a BOOK of recipes.
We went through a period when our kids were about 6 to 8 in which they refused to eat anything green (but blue--epecially that awful smelly candy that tastes like soap--was fine with them).
Then my older son was invited to a friend's house for dinner. When he got home, he said, "I had something delicious at Nick's house...it is called "broccoli." I think the best idea is to send one's kids elsewhere to try new kinds of food that they won't eat at home..send them somewhere they won't dare wince and turn up their noses and clamp shut their reluctant little jaws. Then you can re-introduce the REAL green stuff and they'll think you are doing THEM a favor.
Somehow, the idea of hiding vegetables inside of cake seems like a bad idea, as if vegetables are so shameful and disgusting that they must be hidden.....gets people off to a really bad start when it comes to eating REAL vegetables in their most healthy state.
You must be logged in to comment. Log in or connect with
