Diet - Eggs or no eggs?

Hey Jeff, I’ve heard about BRCA1/2 for years, and knew it mostly as it pertained to breast cancer in women. I had heard that it could also affect men, but until I met you on this forum I had never come across anyone who actually had the mutation.
It’s kind of like having 2 strikes against you already before you even get up to the plate.
I’ve been doing some reading on it in an attempt to grasp what it actually does in the body…my God!
What you say about it not allowing DNA to repair itself is just the tip of the iceberg. I got a headache trying to read the studies by the NIH and others; the biochemistry is on a level waaaaay above my station.
But it seems this collection of germ lines - as they are called - affect and are affected by insulin, fats and other compounds.
You are quite correct in cutting a lot of your sugar consumption because the mutation is insulin dependent in some people ( they still can’t figure out who/why) and the cancer rapidly progresses in the obese…..and worse, the mutation can affect the normal insulin itself, which then becomes a pathogenic form of insulin. It does similar things to lipids…
So the age-old question of the chicken and the egg becomes totally unanswerable; did the cancer cause X to happen…or did X cause the cancer?? In BRCA it seems the answer would be YES to both questions….ugh!!!

I’ve attended a number of seminars About BRCA None of them have gone into discussing the specific point about insulin being Mutated. You’d think that would be important.

I guess I should do a little research.

The BRCA effect on metabolism seems to revolve around insulin and glucose and fats; but not in the ways we, as laymen, would think about these molecular compounds. Not the “sugar causes cancer” thing, but the fact that even though cancer cells “prefer” glucose, they can also use fermentation ( no glucose) to get energy. The needs of the tumor cell to reproduce and grow at a rapid rate is so vast that they can learn to use almost any compound in order to grow….they are hungry! So avoiding all sugar really won’t help you all that much - they’ll use something else.
The insulin is a little trickier in that it doesn’t exactly mutate, but becomes useless in some obese individuals with BRCA mediated cancers; but did they become obese because of this or did their BRCA mutated cells have some component which made the insulin stop working, inducing diabetes?
There are papers written on an atomic level (really) that talk about this enzyme donating so many electrons to such and such as to forego active phosphorylation….etc, etc.
Biochemists can’t even follow these complicated pathways - we certainly cannot either! Suffice to say that when you skip down to the “Conclusions” section of the paper you are given a host of conflicting scenarios, observations that openly contradict one another ( and acknowledged by the authors), and many more questions than answers….exhausting!!
I think that some cancers- especially those mediated by an enigmatic mutation like BRCA - will never be totally understood; but the fact that science has come up with PARP inhibitors which prevent the tumor cells from repairing themselves is as close to divine justice as you can get: the BRCA mutation, which prevents DNA from repairing itself, is now prevented from repairing ITS OWN DNA by an inhibitor and it slowly dies….Is that symmetry, or what??

This seems to be the study, although I can't find egg-specific conclusions.*
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32132146/
It's interesting that eating chicken lowers risk of premature death:

"Lower risks associated with poultry. The study also suggests that eating poultry, including unprocessed chicken and turkey may lower the risk of developing advanced prostate cancer.

Specifically, Wang’s team found that men in the study who ate about 3.5 servings of poultry a week either before or after being diagnosed with prostate cancer, or both before and after, have a 10% to 20% lower risk of prematurely dying from all causes. It’s worth noting, however, that this benefit seems to be driven by unprocessed chicken and turkey sources, rather than slices such as lunch meat commonly used on sandwiches."

* cancer.org references it ...
https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-highlights/prostate-cancer-research-highlights/survivorship-studies/study-prostate-cancer-survivors-who-eat-more-chicken-and-less-steak-may-live-longer.html#:~:text=Eggs%20with%20the%20yolk%20(The,of%20dying%20from%20prostate%20cancer.)

This conversation will soon be moot because eggs will cost $500 apiece 😃 (sorry, couldn't resist)

Everything I’ve read said eggs are bad, so I stopped eating them. With the money I saved I bought a yacht (sorry for the lame attempt at humor)

You might be reading more into that than the researchers intended. This is the closest they came to a recommendation:

" Our findings provide additional evidence that prostate cancer survivors should follow the nutrition guidelines limiting red and processed meat consumption to improve overall survival. Additional research on the relationship of specific meat types and mortality is needed. "

So if you had a hen that laid golden eggs instead of real ones, you'd be losing money? 😉

Yes, that ubiquitous boilerplate advice that we all know so well by now eschewing red meat, processed meat, etc.
I remember years ago reading a study that in the south of France most fats were derived from poultry fat - either in the form of congealed fat (jewish shmaltz) or an oil, melted and used for cooking. Interestingly, it was NOT olive oil.
The lifespans in this area commonly exceeded 100 years….
So now what do we do with these two pieces of information? Do we say “Eat chicken fat - live to a hundred!”? Unfortunately that’s what most would say, knowing absolutely nothing about other lifestyle practices (smoking, alcohol, exercise, genetics, etc.).
We like our boilerplate and our slogans….just makes life easier, I guess…

Not all eggs are the same.