When eating a lot of eggs, I don’t wind up taking olive oil, but certainly don’t seem to do the worse for it. Quite the contrary actually.
It occurred that it would be worth finding out what the oleic acid (the principal MUFA in olive oil) content of eggs is. I suspected that probably one gets plenty of oleic acid simply from eating a lot of eggs, thus obviating the main purpose of consuming olive oil.
It turns out that eggs are very rich on oleic acid. One source gives an example percentage value of about 45% of the total lipid content.
So in other words, 12 eggs with 480 calories from fat thus contains about 216 calories of oleic acid, or about 24 grams. By comparison a tablespoon of olive oil contains about 10 grams of total monounsaturated fats.
So 12 eggs is comparable in terms of MUFA content to about 2.4 tablespoons of olive oil.
While the optimal amount of oleic acid may be somewhat greater than this, one is hardly terribly low on oleic acid either with this amount of eggs.
And there’s always 18 eggs per day.
So it does seem that if consuming plenty of eggs, omitting olive oil so as to save on the calories from that does wind up making sense.
Olive oil is good not only for its monoinsaturated fat but also for its phenolic compounds which have antioxydant, anti-inflammatory properties.
Anyway eggs are great!
Yes, I didn’t mean to suggest that if happy with both, then for this reason the olive oil ought to be ditched.
But rather that if having high egg intake and worried about not taking the olive oil (out of the fact that one doesn’t and can’t seem to get to) or are concerned about how much calories can add up, or have been thinking “My MUFA intake has probably been deficient,” the mind can be put at ease.
It also raises the interesting or at least amusing question – to which the answer is “no” as to whether all those doctors and “health experts” who are educated so much that they know all kinds of things that aren’t so, will on the basis of eggs being so high in MUFA now decide that maybe they’re not so terrible after all: could actually be healthy.
Oh wait, they contain the sterol substance cholesterol, and OBVIOUSLY dietary intake of this sterol, being named cholesterol, must increase blood levels of low-density-lipoprotein, a completely different substance which they also call “cholesterol,” and that would be bad. Bad, bad egg!