How To Eat Eggs If You Want A Suspiciously Long Life

We all know that certain dietary habits tend, more often than not, to cut your life short — think eating endless junk food or drinking copious amounts of alcohol — but what about dietary habits that do the opposite? While more veggies and fruits in your diet is always a good thing, as is eating fewer processed foods, there are also a lot of singular, specific foods out there that people say will give you a long life, often mostly based on some random 100-year-old relative they knew that had their own peculiar dietary habits.

Take, for example, the 105-year-old Covid-19 survivor who credits her gin-soaked raisins (via The New York Times). There's also Julia Child, who, as a Harvard curator points out on Twitter, ate "100% whatever the hell she wanted" and still lived to the age of 91. Another user on Twitter noted that "my grandma lived to a health 97 eating butter, eggs, cheese, bacon, and lard." And, to that user, Chef Michael Symon replied with his own grandpa's food "hack" for a suspiciously long life of nearly 103 years: eggs every morning on toast with goose fat.

While most can probably guess that just eating eggs every day, on toast with goose fat, is not likely to cure all your ailments or automatically extend your lifespan, there may indeed be some critical health benefits found within Chef Michael Symon's grandfather's daily breakfast. As the Mayo Clinic Health System reports, while eggs do get a bad reputation for their cholesterol content, that bad cholesterol isn't a worry if you're only eating seven servings of eggs per week, or one egg every morning. The eggs offer plenty of benefits apart from the cholesterol, including an average of 6 grams of protein, vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin B12, and choline.

But what about the duck fat? While it's easy to assume anything with "fat" in the name is a bad choice, that's not the case with duck fat. According to a Los Angeles Times article, duck fat is high in unsaturated fats and it's closer in chemical makeup to olive oil than it is to butter, making it a healthier alternative to not just butter but also pork fat and beef fat. So, maybe Michael Symon's grandad knew what he was doing.

Despite the health benefits behind eggs and duck fat, as well as the many people who report that their grandparents ate such-and-such and lived to be 100, there really isn't any legitimate science behind the youth-giving properties of most of these foods. However, science does seem to agree that certain areas of the world, or "blue zones," tend to have large, healthy elderly populations and that, in these blue zones, it's 10 times more likely to live to 100 than it is in the United States (via Self). One of the commonalities between the blue zones and what most researchers credit for these impressive longevity rates? Diet.

All of the blue zones tend to focus heavily on diets rich in vegetables and lean proteins like fish, as well as fresh dairy and whole grains. The diets rarely incorporate red meat or processed foods. Sure, it's not as fun as eggs and duck fat, or even gin-soaked raisins — but it does seem to work.