A Harvard medical student, Nick Norwitz, decided to eat 720 eggs in one month to see what the effect would be on his cholesterol. He shares the science behind the experiment.
A Harvard medical student recently completed an “egg-citing” experiment.
Nick Norwitz, 25, decided to eat 720 eggs in one month to see what the effect would be on his cholesterol.
At the end of the month, the Boston man found that his cholesterol levels had dipped by 20%.
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Norwitz — a self-described “academician” with a PhD in metabolic health, who is currently finishing his medical degree at Harvard — said he has always had a passion for sharing his “joy and interest” in science.
“My colleagues and I come up with creative ways to try to translate our awe and love for physiology and biology into something that is interesting and accessible to the public,” he told Fox News Digital.
“The goal is to provoke conversation and bring people to the table so we can talk about human metabolism, which I find utterly fascinating.”
During his egg-eating month, Norwitz consumed 24 eggs per day.
He ate them in “all the ways,” he said — scrambled, fried, omelets, deviled.
“Eggs are a pretty versatile food, so making them in different ways made for a pretty pleasant experiment — it wasn’t that difficult.”
For the first two weeks, it was against the backdrop of an otherwise very low-carbohydrate diet, he said, and then he added carbs for the second two weeks.
“The purpose of this whole experiment was a metabolic demonstration to discuss the ‘levers’ that can affect cholesterol in different individuals.”
“I expected my cholesterol levels not to change by just adding the eggs — and that is indeed what happened.”
It was when he added the carbs that his cholesterol levels dropped, due to a metabolic shift after having adapted to the low-carb diet — a phenomenon that he explains in more detail in the video at the top of the article.
One key thing Norwitz has learned — from this experiment and others he’s done — is that there’s not one “best” human diet.
“When evaluating what is a good diet for a person, you need to consider their baseline metabolic health, and also what their goals are,” he told Fox News Digital.
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Some people, for example, might be optimizing for longevity, while others might be focused on cardiovascular health or looking to keep inflammatory bowel disease in remission.
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Norwitz said he has many more experiments planned to spark awareness and knowledge of how foods affect the body’s functions and overall health.
“I am passionate about making metabolic health mainstream,” he said. “This is only the tip of the iceberg.”
