Eggs

I know it's neither Christmas nor Easter, but recently I a) enjoyed a particularly delicious breakfast of scrambled eggs (with a dash of Tabasco and a few slices of ripe avocado on the side) and b) saw a programme about Japanese cooking which included a kind of savoury and rather runny egg custard, and I was reminded about the power of The Egg, one of nature's finest foods and faster than most fast food.

Whenever I refer to the coach of the unparalleled Mark Allen, a man called Philip Maffetone, I do so with mixed feelings, since much of Maffetone's renown is due surely to the amazing qualities of Allen the athlete rather than Maffetone the coach, and the training principles that he extols as being applicable to every athlete are probably not. However, I feel he is very sound on nutrition, and he does have a thing about eggs too.

Maffetone regards eggs as the perfect food. "We can live almost entirely on eggs," he says, adding that they contain all our essential nutrients except niacin and vitamin C. So vitamins A, D, E, B1, B2, B6, folic acid and B12 are all there, as are all the amino acids (protein) required for growth and repair. Minerals like calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc and iron are all represented, and the fat in egg yolk is an excellent balance of 36% saturated to 64% unsaturated. Two EFAs, essential fatty acids, linoleic and linolenic, crucial in the regulation of blood cholesterol, are also there.

Maffetone cites a report in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine about "the egg man", an 88-year-old man who had a documented history of eating 25 eggs every day. Medical examinations found him to be in excellent health, with serum cholesterol levels of 150-200, where 250 is thought to be a little too high, of normal weight and good heart health.

But how do you eat 25 eggs a day? Even if you stay awake for 16 hours, that averages out at over an egg an hour. Do you eat five meals of five eggs? Three meals of eight eggs? One boiled egg first thing, then a 24-egg blowout at dinner? And did he use a variety of egg recipes? Souffles, scrambled, omelettes, soft-boiled, hard-boiled, poached, fried, custards...?