A Good Egg is Hard to Find, Emily Martin. Print available through Etsy.com


Eat your eggs

Another reason to love eggs: consuming eggs during pregnancy may safeguard your offspring against breast cancer.

A stunning discovery based on epigenetics (the inheritance of propensities acquired in the womb) reveals that consuming choline—a nutrient found in eggs and other foods—during pregnancy may significantly affect breast cancer outcomes for a mother's offspring.

This finding by a team of biologists at Boston University is the first to link choline consumption during pregnancy to breast cancer. It also is the first to identify possible choline-related genetic changes that affect breast cancer survival rates.

"We've known for a long time that some agents taken by pregnant women, such as diethylstibesterol, have adverse consequences for their daughters," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. "But there's an upside. The emerging science of epigenetics has yielded a breakthrough. For the first time, we've learned that we might be able to prevent breast cancer as early as a mother's pregnancy."

Science Daily

Could eating an egg a day also help women produce bigger and healthier babies?

That's the theory being tested in a new trial at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where women are having an egg a day from their fourth or fifth month of pregnancy onwards. Foetal growth will be measured to test the egg effect.

It's known that poor nutrition during pregnancy can lay the foundations for the child's health well into adult life.

Previous research has confirmed eggs as a good source of nutrition during pregnancy. During this time women need more protein, omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins and minerals, including folate, iron and zinc, which have been linked to improved development and lowering of the risk of birth defects. Eggs contain all of these.

Mail Online

Eggs, glorious eggs

Eggs are a great source of protein and are packed with numerous vitamins, including vitamin A, potassium and many B vitamins like folic acid, choline and biotin. You can find delicious recipes from breakfast to brunch and all the way through dinner and desserts that have eggs as their base here.


Egg Quotes:

He'd offer you an egg if you promised not to break the shell. — Irish Proverb

A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg. — Samuel Butler

Nothing is so beautiful as spring — when weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring the ear, it strikes like lightning to hear him sing. — Gerard Manley Hopkins


Crack
Annette Marie Hyder
Previously published in An Appalachian Country Rag

You can taste it
in the peppermint burst of flavor you get
when you breathe in an icy breath
of last night's
last ice storm
of the season.

You can see it in the bird's
wings flapping
like meaningful tea leaves
floating across
the china cup bowl of the sky.

You feel it colored thickly
on your skin
by the crayon yellow sunshine.

CRACK —
rain running down
the sides of trees
leaves colors in its paths.

Spring has cracked all over you
like an egg
bright yellow
and wet.