The National Heart Foundation recommends that people with type 2 diabetes limit their egg consumption, but a new study funded by the Australian Egg Corporation challenges that wisdom.

The study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, randomised 128 patients with pre-diabetes or Type 2 diabetes to either a high-egg or low-egg weight loss diet for three months.

They followed the patients for 12 months and found that the patients on the high-egg diet (12 or more per week) had no adverse cardiometabolic markers compared to those on the low-egg diet (two or less per week).

There was no significant difference in the HDL-cholesterol concentrations between the two groups over the three-month duration of the diet.

There were no significant differences in fasting serum concentrations of LDL cholesterol, total cholesterol, apoB, trigylcerides, IL-6, sE-selectin or f2-isoprostanes between the two groups from the start of the weight-loss intervention to six or 12 months.

There were also no differences in weight loss efficacy – participants in both groups loss around 2 kg by the diet’s conclusion, and a total of 3 kg by 12 months.

The study “extends our previous findings that a high-egg compared with a low-egg diet has no detrimental effect on CVD risk factors in persons with prediabetes or T2D during 3 months of weight maintenance by showing that the same is true during weight loss and for a 12 month period,” wrote lead author Dr Nick Fuller, from the University of Sydney’s Boden Institute of Obesity, Nutrition, Exercise and Eating Disorders, and his co-authors.

“These findings do not align with the health recommendations of some countries that specifically recommend a low-egg diet for people with T2D,” they wrote, pointing to Australia’s National Heart Foundation which recommends no more than six eggs per week for people with T2D.

“Our findings suggest that a high-egg diet is safe for those with T2D – just as for the general population – without adverse consequences for cardiovascular risk factors.”