Low Cholesterol on 25 Eggs Per Day

Source: Do You Enjoy Eating Eggs?, New England Journal of Medicine, 1991.

The subject of this case was an 88-year-old man living alone in a retirement community. He was healthy except for having Alzheimer's disease. He also had a compulsive disorder which led him to consume, in addition to regular meals, 25 soft-boiled eggs every day. Remarkably, there was good evidence from several sources that this egg-eating behavior had been going on for at least 15 years.

The major metabolic product of cholesterol is bile acids. The disposal of bile acids by secretion into bile is one of several factors that serve to maintain normal blood cholesterol concentrations, as was demonstrated in an elderly man with a compulsion to eat eggs.

The patient's medical records documented numerous serum cholesterol measurements within the normal range. A number of metabolic studies indicated that the patient had several compensatory mechanisms in place which enabled him to maintain normal blood cholesterol concentrations in the face of longstanding and massive cholesterol intake:

• Marked reduction in cholesterol absorption - the mechanism for this effect is not known.



• Greatly increased synthesis (see definition) of bile acids - the patient synthesized roughly twice the mass of bile acids as control subjects.



• Reduced endogenous cholesterol synthesis (definition).

Definitions:
Endogenous – resulting from conditions within the organism rather than externally caused.
Synthesis – the forming or building of a more complex substance or compound from elements or simpler compounds.