To eat or not to eat

For years I had been avoiding eating eggs though I love omelettes, especially Spanish omelettes with artery-clogging mounds of mayonnaise.

My breakfast was usually creamy scrambled eggs warmed on a hot pan with a dollop of butter. Then one day a scientific study said that eating eggs would give you a heart attack and that dying on the breakfast table was inconsiderate to other members of the family.

Eggs have cholesterol, said the warning from experts. That was confusing because for years I was told that eggs were good for health as they were a good source of protein.

On the section on ‘longevity', www.about.com tells us that after the scare about heart attacks, the cholesterol in eggs was found to be ‘neutral' and we could eat a few eggs a day. So, it was re-discovered that eggs were good for you.

Then along came another study warning that eating seven or more eggs a week could increase your chances of kicking the bucket. A Harvard study of more than 21,000 male physicians found that men who ate up to six eggs a week had no increase in their probability of death, but once they ate a seventh egg, their risk of death went up 23 per cent.

Confusion

That confused me. I couldn't make up my mind on which one day of the week I should not eat an egg.

When I was growing up in a small town in India there was a famous movie star who was also a wrestler. Like most Hollywood action heroes such as Schwarzenegger or Stallone who never talk much, he too didn't say anything erudite apart from grunting as he hurled villains into ravines.

This actor/wrestler had a massive appetite and I was amazed to read in a tabloid that he consumed a dozen eggs, some chicken, a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk, and I forget what else, for breakfast. Despite eating like an ancient Roman on an orgy and gorging on those villainous eggs, that man never keeled over and died on the movie sets.

At that time there were no confusing studies being conducted about the merits or demerits of food. People cooked curries in clarified butter and nobody died. Even if they did everyone blamed it on bad tap water or pollution.

While this controversy was going on about eggs, we decided to banish them from our household and struck them off our grocery list. During the weekend jaunt to the mall for our fast-food fix we would study the menu to avoid the killers that came in white shells.

Except, of course, my mother-in-law who decided to eat only the white of the eggs. The eggs had to be boiled in water to a certain temperature which drove the cook crazy and congealed the yolk of the egg into a hard ball. My mother-in-law would spoon out the yellowish ball and place it on the side of the plate where it would sometimes go round and round like the small balls in a pinball machine.

For years, there was a running battle between my mother-in-law and the cook, an uneducated woman from rural north India, who believed that eating eggs, even the yolk, was good for you.

Incidentally, my wife never drank coffee as she said the brew made her jittery and gave her sleepless nights. So we never spent our free time at Starbucks with a laptop. Occasionally she would give herself a treat of ‘filter coffee', a south Indian concoction that is something like ‘karak chai' you find in Dubai cafeterias.

Recently, I noticed he was drinking more ‘filter coffee' than usual. I found out that it was because of a scientific study that found drinking coffee made women smarter.