A dietician’s take on the hard boiled egg diet

SALT LAKE CITY — One of the latest fad diets making the rounds on TikTok is the hard-boiled egg diet. It includes hard-boiled eggs as the protein source of all meals.

Videos about the hard-boiled egg diet have garnered millions of views on TikTok and Instagram. Eggs are indeed rich in vitamins, protein, and amino acids, but too much of any one thing isn’t usually recommended by dieticians.

 “There’s always going to be a new diet that has some magic miracle thing that’s going to happen,” said Jacob Schmidt, a registered dietician. “It’s going be this special food, whether it’s cucumber or an egg or whatever it might be.

“The reality is we just do better with a varied diet,” said Schmidt. 

According to the dietician, while consuming eggs isn’t unhealthy, the problem occurs when dieters exclude other healthy forms of protein or other nutrients.

“Anytime you eliminate a large variety of foods and food groups, you tend to have issues with nutrient intake. You’re not going to have a balanced food intake,” Schmidt said. 

He recommended eating a variety of vegetables, fruits, and lean protein along with your hard-boiled eggs.

Why is balance in our diet important?

Based on research from The Cleveland Clinic, variety in our diet assures more options for our bodies. For example, eating cashews and pine nuts will boost your magnesium, but switching that up for sunflower seeds once in a while will boost vitamin E.

A study of Swedish women published by the International Journal of Epidemiology found that women who ate a variety of foods “significantly” lowered mortality when compared to women who ate a smaller variety.

A study of Korean men and women published in Nutrition Research and Practice found that a varied diet can reduce the chance of metabolic syndrome, defined by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute as a group of conditions that increase your chances of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.

Other reading:

• ‘Keto-like’ diet may be associated with a higher risk of heart disease
• The science behind the gluten-free diet
• Intuitive eating: The anti-diet, or how pleasure from food is the answer, say its creators