• Eggs are one of the few nearly complete foods for a human body—nature designed them to be the sole source of food and nutrients to the fast-growing chick embryo. Their protein content is high, 13 percent (or 6 grams in each large egg). Even the egg shell is nutritious, 96 percent calcium carbonate, an essential element for building human bones (but how do we eat it?). If the kids get upset with bits of egg shell in their scrambled eggs, assure them that you are just trying to help them build strong bones.

• Once a favorite breakfast food in the  Anglo-Saxon world, egg consumption has steadily declined since the 1950s. Americans ate 402 eggs apiece annually in 1945 (1.1/day). By 1991 per capita consumption had dropped to 234 (0.6/day), but it is slowly rising again. In 1998 the annual consumption is 255 eggs. The major reason for the decline is all that   cholesterol in the yolk, a health concern to many people today. A large egg contains an average of 215 milligrams of cholesterol. Its total fat content is a moderate 5 grams or 10 percent of each egg. All the cholesterol and fat are in the yolk.

• Food scientists are working feverishly to reduce the cholesterol level of eggs, attacking the problem on several levels. One approach is to cut down on the development of cholesterol before the hen produces the egg. Biologists are putting laying hens on special to do that.
• Another approach is to chemically remove some of the cholesterol after the hen lays the egg. If we can take the caffeine out of coffee beans, surely we can reduce the amount of cholesterol in eggs to a tolerable level. It is just a matter of time. But to do this, biochemists have to remove the eggs from the shells and add chemicals that bind with the cholesterol, then remove the chemical together with the cholesterol. This part was easy. They ran into problem getting the eggs back into their original containers after they reduced the cholesterol. At this time they can only market the low-cholesterol eggs as scrambled or separated into yolks and whites.

• Genetic alteration of the hens is another approach they are working on. In early 1995, a small egg farm in the Milwaukee area introduced “designer” eggs with 25 percent less fat and 25 percent lower cholesterol using this technique.