If your'e a chicken, don't smoke

Smoked fish.

If you were annoyed to learn recently that eggs are once again bad for you, relax.

A study looked at patients with an average age of 62, some of whom really loved eggs and some of whom really loved cigarettes. Researcher David Spence then measured the amount of plaque in their arteries.

The results? Both smoking and eating eggs were independently associated with plaque increases, and eggs were almost as bad as cigarettes. “The effect size of egg yolks appears to be approximately 2/3 that of smoking,” Spence wrote. “Probably egg yolks should be avoided by persons at risk of vascular disease.” 

The problem is that the conclusion is based on self-reported lifetime history of smoking and egg-eating  -- and only smoking and egg-eating.

While it’s entirely possible that people who ate a bunch of eggs filled the rest of their diets with kale and dust and steel-cut oats, it’s just as possible they were eating those eggs alongside bacon and sausage and Hollandaise sauce. In other words: Maybe eggs aren’t solely to blame here.

In fact, we have no way of telling, based on this study, what role eggs specifically played in the development of these arterial plaques.

Antonis Zampelos, a nutrition professor, told Canada’s CBC News that these results lack validity. “The results are not as strong as the statement that came out … I’m not saying that this is not an interesting study. I’m saying that you can’t really make such a strong statement about smoking.”

“This is very poor quality research that should not influence patient’s dietary choices,” Steven Nissen, chair of the department of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, told ABC News. “It is extremely important to understand the differences between ‘association’ and ‘causation’.”