How can some eggs be better for you than others?

If you've been to the grocery store recently, you know that eggs come in many varieties, some claiming to be better for you than others. What differentiates a normal egg from a "special" one? Find out in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to brain Stuff from how stuff works dot com
where smart Happens. I am Marshall Brain with today's question,
how can an egg carton claim that the contained eggs
have less fat and more vitamin E than another egg?

(00:23):
Eggs seem like they should be a commodity item, with
one egg being about the same as any other. But
if you've been to a grocery store lately, you know
that egg types are proliferating. You can buy eggs based
on their size and color, as well as the organic
content of the feed the chickens eat, the amount of
freedom the chickens have while they're eating, and so on.

(00:44):
And now farmers are starting to differentiate their eggs using
nutritional claims. It turns out that the eggs you bought
are patented, and the patent reveals that all of the
benefits come from the diet fed to the chickens. What
a chicken eats has a significant effect on what ends
up in that chicken's egg. By feeding the chicken a

(01:05):
diet rich in vitamin E and low and saturated fat,
the eggs end up being high in vitamin E and
low and saturated fat. There are two other ways that
a farmer or breeder could change the contents of an egg.
One way involves the traditional selective breeding approach. If the
farmer were to analyze eggs from a hundred chickens and

(01:27):
find the chickens that produced eggs with, for example, the
lowest amount of cholesterol, the farmer could then breed just
those chickens with each other. By repeating this process over
several generations, the farmer may be able to create a
stable line of chickens that have lower amounts of cholesterol
in their eggs. Farmers use this technique all the time

(01:49):
for all kinds of farm products. For example, they breathe
the sweetest corn plants in an attempt to make sweet
corn sweeter, and so on. The other way would involve
some form of genetic engineering in which one or more
genes are added to or subtracted from the chickens DNA
for more illness, and thousands of other topics. Because it

(02:11):
how stuff works, dot Com