What's Your Opinion on Pastured Eggs?

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What's your opinion on pastured eggs? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert A.

Larson in Mon from Instagram.

I wonder what the heck that means? Asks what's your opinion on pastured eggs? Well, I had to actually go do a little research on this one to really get all the terms down and I will be right back with the full story. Stay with me.

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All right, so one of the things that I have you pull in the virgin diet, drop seven foods, lose seven pounds just seven days. And one of the foods that I have you pull are eggs. Eggs. You know, I gotta tell you, for years I was like, eggs are nature's perfect food. But what I started to discover was that eggs for people, for some people, can be a trigger for autoimmune disease and tends to be one of the higher food intolerance of foods. Now that does not mean that you can't eat them forever. But while you're healing your gut or if you're struggling with an autoimmune disease, eggs may just be off your plate. Here's something interesting though that I started to find. For some people, they can eat pastured eggs just fine. It's the factory eggs that are creating the problems. So let's deconstruct this all and get you understanding the difference between a factory egg, which could be free range caged or cage free, and a pasture raised egg. Because they're entirely different eggies. And here's the important thing. You are what you eat ate. You are what you eat ate. So one of the foods that I pull out in the virgin diet is corn and soy, of course, corn and soy. And one of the challenges is that for a lot of these factory hens, they are fed dun dun, dun corn and soy and generally genetically modified corn and soy. And so here's the challenge. Is it the egg or is it the corn and soy? Well, if the, if the chicken's being fed corn soy, we don't know. So that's why you want to have pastured eggs. So let me tell you the difference between all of these and why you do want to eat pastured eggs and why if you're going through the virgin diet and you're re challenging, you want to make sure that you re challenge with pastured eggs and that those are the ones you eat. The other ones are basically the junk food of eggs. We don't want to do that. It's just like eating farmed salmon or factory beef. It's kind of like the junk food of those foods. Remember, remember, remember, you are what you eat Ate. Okay, so there are caged hens, there are cage free hens, there are free range hens, and there are pastured raised hens. Let's talk about all of them. And I kind of went from worst to best in that. There you go. So caged hens, and we've all seen those movies where those hens are like put in those cages all shoved together and it's dirty and they're pecking at each other. That's the majority of eggs in the United States are from these hens that are in cages. And they're like in cages their entire egg laying life. They're just shoved in this little cage with other chickens right up against them, pecking and dirty and yucky and blech. So that's the caged hen. And they are fed a corn or soy or both diet. Remember, that's generally going to be a GMO corn and soy. Next cage free. This sounds better, doesn't it? But they're not entirely free. They have. They're not, they're not like shoved in so tight they can't move like the caged ones, but they kind of live in less than one square foot. So they're not exactly free roaming all over the place. And they still consume a corn or soy diet. So don't be fooled by that. It's really not that much better than caged. So caged and cage free are the ones that we're going to stay away from. Next up, free range. All right, well, this sounds better, but it's not as good as it sounds. It sounds like they're out there roaming the range. Right? Free range. No, most of them don't even see the light of day and are fed again, a corn or soy based feed. And they have about 2ft, 2 square feet per head. So they have a little more space. But they're not really out there wandering around. See, here's the thing. And I remember when I was writing the Virgin Diet, I'm like, what do chickens eat? Well, the deal is chickens eats whatever chickens can find. And really they should be out roaming around, roaming the pasture. And they'll eat grass and bugs and worms and anything else that they can pretty much find in the dirt. So pastured, raised, you've got these hens and they're out, they're having feed, they're having grass, they're having bugs, they're having the things that chickens love to have. They go out of the barn in the morning, they get back before nightfall. Those are the eggies that we want to have. They're entirely different makeup than the other eggs. They have three times more vitamin D, four times more vitamin E, seven times more beta carotene than those other eggs I was telling you about and oh, twice as much Omega 3s. So super superior. Better for the environment too. Happier eggs too. So here's the deal. If you haven't done the virgin diet yet, what what are you waiting for? Do it. Pull out those seven foods. See how you feel when you go back to challenge eggs. Make sure you challenge only with pastured eggs. I remember when I first went back and challenged, I couldn't eat eggs for three months. I had to really heal my gut. But once I got it back together again, I I can eat pastured eggs and I rotate them into the diet, but I still don't eat those other ones, the junk food. Okay, stick with the pastured eggs. Thanks so much for that question so that we could shed light on the real truth about eggs.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert.

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