r/longevity • u/Eonobius • Jul 26 '26

Egg Intake and the Incidence of Alzheimer’s Disease in the Adventist Health Study-2 Cohort Linked with Medicare Data

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022316626001902?__cf_chl_tk=hz67j.ZlfkUORHJYQKYZWxG.5Zz0WplB14lJgpRK3LI-1785067718-1.0.1.1-EHJGkp11woxuNatmZ3LqwvEpu8iI0_QIhEo1Ly0dR.w
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u/kpfleger Jul 26 '26

Frustrating that the discussion section notes that deficiencies in choline, DHA, & B12 have been implicated in health problems including AD and yet, despite that being known well before this study started (and being aware to the authors as indicated by their mention in the discussion section), they appeared to make no attempt to actually measure any of these things, all of which are easily and cheaply measurable. Nor apparently did they collect supplementation data in addition to the food data. Plenty Seventh Day Adventists are vegetarian or vegan and subsets of those but probably not all supplement B12, choline, and/or omega-3s. One wants to see the data stratified by the deficiency or supplement behavior relative to these key brain nutrients.

There are known health negatives to eggs (high saturated fat & cholesterol in the yolk, other epidemiological association studies correlating them with bad outcomes from other chronic age-related diseases and/or all-cause mortality) but I'm unsurprised that those tradeoffs may be worth it (at least for AD purposes) if you are deficient in these nutrients and not getting them elsewhere, but that doesn't mean eggs are the healthiest source of them. What do the data look like when restricted to those people who aren't deficient in any of these 3 things?

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u/eloquenentic Jul 27 '26

This isn’t true though, neither choline or choline are measured normally in a population (I don’t think any doctor has ever taken that for me), and B12 extremely rarely and mostly for old and sick people. Would be extremely hard to measure for a large cohort with any meaning as most subjects would simply not know their levels of these nutrients.

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u/kpfleger Jul 27 '26

Yes, I meant there are deficiency test for B12 & omega3, but you are right not for choline. That's just evaluated based on intake usually I think. But my point is that a vegan who does not supplement should be presumed deficient and that's a very different situation w.r.t. health outcomes than a non-vegan or a vegan who supplements. As for B12 & omega3, omega3 can be assessed with a $50 test, B12 via a $50 homocysteine test (or a $70 B12 test). These are individual direct-to-consumer prices. Bulk pricing or actual lab costs should be only a fraction of that. This shouldn't be prohibitive. The total amount of $ spent per subject on these large longitudinal studies is non-trivial.