Enjoy your eggs; they can be tool to fight obesity

• By CHERAMIE SONNIER
• Assistant food editor
• Published: Mar 20, 2008 - UPDATED: 03.20.08

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Go ahead, enjoy those Easter eggs.

Recent research shows that eggs don’t have to be barred from the average American diet — and they just might help dieters lose their excess weight.

According to a Pennington Biomedical Research Center study, overweight women trying to lose weight and who start their day with eggs lose significantly more pounds, reduce their waist size more and feel more energetic than women who eat a bagel breakfast with the same number of calories.

Nikhil Dhurandhar, an associate professor at Pennington, who headed the study, was involved in an earlier study that found that the protein in eggs helped overweight women feel full longer, helping them eat less for the remainder of the day.

Dhurandhar, a native of India, is “the first person to publish about viruses causing some obesity in some humans and coined the term ‘infectobesity,’” said Glen Duncan, director of communications for Pennington.

The researcher holds a master’s degree in nutrition from North Dakota State University and a Ph.D. degree in biochemistry from a school in Bombay. Dhurandhar also is a physician who practiced in India as an obesity consultant, but he’s not sought a license to practice in the United States.

His interest in the treatment of obesity and his curiosity about a chicken virus are what brought him back to the United States and to Pennington and ultimately led to egg studies funded by the American Egg Board.

“My father is the founder of the field of obesity studies in India,” he said. “When I was growing up, I heard about problems of obese people. I practiced about eight years and treated about 1,000 cases a year.”

In the late 1980s, he did a project in which he demonstrated that there is a huge prevalence of obesity in Bombay. “Over 25 percent, which was comparable to the United States at that time,” Dhurandhar said. “The degree of obesity is different. In India, you don’t see the massive obesity — 500 pounds — that you see in the U.S. It’s based on the definition of Body Mass Index. A BMI of 25-30 is overweight, above 30 is classified as obesity. For example, a 6-foot tall man of 225 pounds or higher is considered obese.”

A conversation with family friend, S.M. Ajinkya, a veterinary pathologist, changed Dhurandhar’s life. Ajinkya had discovered an avian adenovirus, SMAM-1, was responsible for killing chickens.

Dhurandhar learned that the infected chickens had pale, big livers and more fat in their abdomens. He asked if it was possible the virus was making the chickens fat.

“Against lots of resistance from colleagues, he helped me set up three groups of chickens, one uninfected as a control group housed separately, one infected group and a third uninfected group kept in the same cages as the infected cage mates,” Dhurandhar said.

“Three weeks later, all the chickens in the infected and in-contact groups had more body fat and were infected with SMAM-1,” he continued. “Paradoxically, their cholesterol and triglycerides levels had dropped. This was a consistent finding. We repeated the study with 100 chickens. It was very intriguing.”