If there’s one thing to know about Ivy League students in Massachusetts, it’s that they’re big fans of doing things that other people never consider. For example, there was the MIT Blackjack Team that, in the 1990s, hit up casinos to count cards and made a small fortune. Then there were the MIT students who decided to “hack” Harvard Bridge in October 1965 by measuring it all out in “smoots,” named for Oliver R. Smoot whose body was used as a human measuring tape. Now, in yet another head-scratching moment to come out of Massachusetts, Harvard medical student Nick Norwitz ate 24 eggs every day for a month — and lived to tell about it.
The metabolic experiment, as Norwitz called it, resulted in him consuming 720 eggs and intaking 133,000 mg of dietary cholesterol during one month. Why? Because, as mentioned, that’s what Ivy League kids are into — and he wanted to see the effect it would have on his body. Before Norwitz got started on his experiment, he had already hypothesized that his cholesterol, or at least what’s considered “bad” cholesterol, aka LDL (low-density lipoprotein), wouldn’t increase. Not only was he right, but when he added carbs to the second half of his experiment, his cholesterol decreased by a whopping 18%.
While the American Health Association says you shouldn’t eat more than one to two eggs a day, because of Norwitz’s understanding of human metabolism, he wasn’t afraid to just go all in on his experiment. And, to use his word, it was an “eggs-citing” process with an equally “eggs-citing” outcome.
How did Nick Norwitz not blow his cholesterol through the roof?
Before we even get into the how and why of things, it should be noted that Nick Norwitz isn’t a Harvard undergrad just messing around for fun. In addition to working toward his medical degree from Harvard, he already has his Ph.D. in metabolic health from Oxford University, so he wasn’t exactly just winging it with this experiment. “The purpose of this whole experiment was a metabolic demonstration to discuss the ‘levers’ that can affect cholesterol in different individuals,” Norwitz told Fox News Digital. “I expected my cholesterol levels not to change by just adding the eggs — and that is indeed what happened.”
After a low-carb diet for the first half of the month, when Norwitz added healthy carbs in the form of fruit, it caused his cholesterol to drop, a phenomenon he called a metabolic shift. “The extra dose of carbs dominated over the insane amounts of cholesterol I was consuming,” Norwitz told the New York Post.
Although Norwitz cited his love for metabolic health as the main reason behind the experiment, he also wanted to counter the mentality that there’s not only one healthy way for humans to eat. “Sadly, the messages on social media, particularly in the diet space, are often shallow or hollow,” Norwitz said in his YouTube video. “But I think they can serve as intellectual provocation.” In other words, Norwitz would prefer you question the information you’re given, instead of taking it all at face value, because not every body is the same.
