Some eggs are making me sick, and I figured out why!
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Do you feel sick after eating eggs, but not all eggs? I may have cracked the code on why some eggs leave me feeling nauseous and achy, while others leave me feeling fine.
Why do eggs make me sick?
I've been meaning to write about this for a long time. Someone other than me must be suffering from this and not know it. It took me months to figure out that eggs were making me sick to my stomach. Maybe I can help someone else figure it out quicker than I did.
About fifteen months ago, I started feeling sick to my stomach. Not always nauseous, more like how you feel when you know you're going to have diarrhea. And my back was killing me all the time. Sometimes I felt feverish. I felt like this all day, every day, for the summer of 2013. It really sucked. I slept a lot, and was in fog much of the time.
Ruling Out Wheat
My big fear, at first, was that I was having a problem with wheat. I live on bread and pasta. Take away my carbs and you might as well take away my soul as well. But I was feeling so terrible that I actually tried giving up wheat.
My plan was to do it for a week and see if things got better. But I quit after four days because there was no change. On the one hand I was glad - I could still eat bread! But on the other, I still had no clue what was going on.
Blood and stool tests
After about a month I really started to get worried. Did I have some kind of horrible intestinal disease? Were the amoebas that had hitch-hiked back home with me after a trip to South America in 1998 making a comeback tour? Did I have some kind of cancer?
I went to my doctor, who checked me out and ordered some blood tests and stool tests (man, was that an experience, let me tell you…on second thought, I'm not going to, because it was a really really really gross process). I was afraid of what the tests would find, but whatever it was would be better than not knowing and just feeling sick all the time.
The tests showed nothing.
Breakthrough
Then, after about three months of feeling like that (it was beginning to feel normal - I have no idea how I was functioning), I took the kids to my mom's house in Buffalo for a six-day visit.
One of the reasons I love visiting my mom is that my favorite fast food restaurant, Mighty Taco, is on her corner. Usually, when I'm staying with her I just wait to eat until Mighty Taco opens up at 10:30 and have a nice healthy breakfast of burritos and nachos.
Despite how I was feeling, I kept to my usual Might Taco breakfast schedule (I mean, it wasn't going to make my stomach worse). And by day three I realized that I was feeling better! Not just better, but good. By the time I left my mom's house to head back to Brooklyn, I felt totally normal.
And on the drive back it hit me. It hit me like a ton of bricks falling on my head. I hadn't had a single egg in six days.
At home I start pretty much every single day off with an egg or two, scrambled or in an omelet. I've been doing this for decades. And now, suddenly, eggs appeared to be making me sick.
Was it an egg allergy?
I started reading everything I could about egg allergies, and at first it seemed like that was what I had. It was weird, though, to develop an egg allergy as an adult. Everything I read said that it was most common in kids, and that they usually outgrew it. Also, allergy symptoms usually happen immediately, not several hours later. And I didn't have any kind of respiratory or skin symptoms, which usually go with allergies.
Was it an egg intolerance?
Doing more reading, I discovered that there is such a thing as egg intolerance, which is different from an allergy. I seemed to match the most common symptoms perfectly:
- nausea
- diarrhea
- stomach cramps
- acid reflux
- achy feeling
- brain fog
- fatigue
- headaches
- joint pain
- feverish feeling
Experimenting
When I got home I started experimenting. First, I made some cookies using eggs as an ingredient, and ate a couple. I was fine. I could still eat baked goods! Yay!
Then I hard-boiled an egg and ate that. Again, no reaction. Eggs cooked very well seemed to be OK. Egg salad and deviled eggs were still a go!
Then, just to make sure, I scrambled an egg on my third morning back and ate it. And within three or four hours, that sick feeling came back. Bingo. It took almost two days until I felt OK again.
I was glad (dancing-in-the-streets thrilled, actually) that I'd found the culprit. I would miss eating scrambled eggs, but at least I knew what to avoid.
Fresh brown eggs didn't make me sick!
A couple of months later I was back at my doctor's office for something routine and I mentioned what I'd discovered. She suggested that I try a really fresh egg. Like, right out of the chicken fresh. Hmm.
I figured that Fresh Direct was my best shot. I bought the freshest, most expensive eggs they carried. And I ate one scrambled. And I was fine!!!
Then the next time I bought them, I felt sick again. What the heck was going on?
I kept experimenting with different brands, and found one that never makes me sick. They're expensive, brown eggs from pastured chickens. Maybe it's what the chickens are eating, or maybe this farm gets its eggs to the store quickly. I have no idea! All I know is that I can even eat runny eggs with this brand and I feel fine. (For people who have these brands in their stores, brown pastured eggs from Handsome Brook Farms and Vital Farms are both fine for me.)
Is it the egg whites?
A bunch of things that I read said that for most people with an egg sensitivity, it's usually the whites that are causing the problem. I don't think that's what happened with me. I can eat those liquid egg whites no problem.
I also have no problem with egg sandwiches from Burger King and Dunkin' Donuts, which both use a pasteurized liquid egg product, the kind you pour out of a carton.
I'm able to eat egg sandwiches from McDonald's with no problems as well, which initially confused me. I used to be a grill cook at McDonald's and had personally cracked thousands of white eggs on breakfast shifts. I assumed they still used fresh whole eggs, and had originally written here that perhaps McDonald's just went through so many eggs that they never got the chance to get old.
But a reader clued me in that McDonald's now also uses liquid packaged eggs! (I'm not sure why I didn't look this up myself while writing this post instead of just assuming that everything was still the same as when I worked there several decades ago. I guess I didn't want to admit that I'm that old!!)
Sure enough, McDonald's now uses liquid eggs in some of its breakfast menu items, but not all.
Basically, if you get an Egg McMuffin, that egg was a whole egg cracked onto the grill. If you get scrambled eggs, those are made from packaged liquid eggs, but are cooked right there on the grill.
The folded eggs that are used on biscuit sandwiches are also liquid eggs, but they were cooked off-site and frozen, and then heated up on the grill at McDonald's. And lastly, the eggs in their breakfast burritos are made from liquid eggs that are cooked off-site, and then microwaved at McDonald's.
So if you have issues with fresh eggs but not packaged liquid eggs, choose accordingly!
Old Eggs
As eggs age, they develop sulfur, and I'm guessing that that's the key here for me (and it's only a guess-I am very much not a doctor!). Really really old, rotten eggs smell overwhelmingly like sulfur, but it takes a long time for an egg to get to that point. There's an in-between point where they don't smell like sulfur yet, but they're no longer fresh.
You can get a clue as to how old an egg is based on whether it floats, stands, or sinks in water. As an egg ages, its protective membrane gets weaker, and air gets inside. A fresh egg will sink, an older egg will stand on end, and a really old egg will float (doesn't mean that that egg isn't safe, it's just old).
According to the USDA, which regulates eggs, the "use by" date can be as long as 45 days after the egg was packed (and they don't seem to define how long the egg can hang around the farm before being packed, either!):
Terminology such as "Use by", "Use before", "Best before" indicates a period that the eggs should be consumed before overall quality diminishes. Code dating using these terms may not exceed 45 days including the day the eggs were packed into the carton.
But here is a factory egg on the left and an expensive farm-fresh egg on the right. Both sank. So if age really is the culprit, we're talking about an amount of time that's a lot smaller than this test can determine.
If I had the patience, I would buy several dozen eggs with the same dates and eat one a day until I got sick, to determine how old an egg could be before it affected me. But I don't see myself doing that any time soon. I buy a dozen eggs from pastured hens each week, and I use the leftovers from the week before for hard-boiled eggs or baking.
Restaurants
I can no longer eat eggs at any old restaurant. Diner and coffee shop eggs have made me sick.
Sometimes if I'm at a really nice restaurant I'll grill my server on how fresh the eggs are (yes, I've had to become that person) and get some, but usually, I just skip them.
As I mentioned before, fast food egg sandwiches seem to agree with me just fine. I cannot, however, eat breakfast sandwiches from our local bagel place, which really bums me out, because we order from there almost every weekend. I tried it twice, and felt sick both times.
Why Write Now?
So why am I writing about this today of all days? Because I'm still getting tripped up by this and did it to myself again yesterday!
I made fresh pasta the way I always make fresh pasta: one egg per person. And since I was making a large amount of pasta and meatballs, I had to send my husband to the store for a couple cartons of eggs. Cheap, factory eggs, because that's what he buys. And since I wasn't cracking the eggs into a pan and eating them right away, it totally didn't occur to me that I needed to use the good eggs!!!
I had two big bowls of pasta last night and then went to bed. I woke up several times last night with reflux and I felt terrible. Feverish and crampy and nauseous.
I woke up this morning thinking it was just the red sauce, which always gives me trouble if I eat it too late. But as the day wore on I felt worse and worse. I asked my husband if he felt OK. I was scared to ask our dinner guests from the night before if they felt sick. Had I poisoned our friends somehow?
And then my back started to hurt and I realized what was going on. Crap.
The good news is (besides the fact that I didn't sicken my friends and family with a pasta dinner somehow), I know that I should feel fine by this time tomorrow.
So what can you do?
If you suspect that you have an intolerance to eggs, I suggest you do on purpose what I did accidentally: stop eating them and see how you feel.
If you feel better, try eating them very well cooked, like in baked goods and hard-boiled eggs. Try liquid eggs. Find really fresh eggs and see if those are OK. Try brown eggs. Try white eggs. Try eggs from pastured chickens that eat grubs all day. See what happens.
Just make sure you give it enough time between so that you know for sure what is affecting you. It takes me about two days to recover after eating eggs that don't agree with me, so if you're testing, you should probably give yourself three days to see if the symptoms go away.
Good luck!
Great article! I discovered this past Spring (2020 of course!) that I have suddenly developed an intolerance for raw eggs. I have been able to eat raw cookie dough and cake batter all my life (almost 59 years) with no problem, and now even the smallest amount makes me terribly sick to my stomach after a few hours or the next day. I also found that duck eggs do the same thing, even thoroughly cooked. Thankfully, so far, chicken eggs are fine as long as they are cooked. But I sure do miss licking the spatula when I make cookies or cake!
wow I just stumbled on this. I think I have figured out my egg trigger. If I eat eggs on an empty stomach I am doomed, but if I have more than just coffee in my tummy, I am usually okay. I often go for brunch and it is my first meal of the day and I am wrecked for the rest of the day.
I never had issues until I was in my twenties.
Wow, I'm not alone!
I have suffered with this egg intolerance for a while now
I just avoid eggs all together
Miss my breakfast eggs
Its really hard to find egg free breads and pastas
There are a few.brands out there
I started making my own breads without eggs -& dont believe the internet to just add more oil to replace the eggs.
I use almond yogurt or almond milk to sub for the eggs.
The egg substitutes are just awful
I did find just egg is pretty good. Dont like the power egg substitutes
Processesed powered eggs come from regular eggs so that wont work. The egg sub products are mostly soy based so you may have to watch or try that
Just egg sub is great
Just mayo is also great
Or other vegan mayo is good too
My friend found a brand of eggs from wholeffods that is soy free
Other markets may have them too
It's both the feed the chickens eat and the cleaning process
Most factory egg chickens are fed soy based meal from China- very bad for us
She started eating eggs where the chickens were soy free and no more problems
The cleaning process maybe part of the problem too
Heaven forbid we get some bacteria
Yes salmonella is a bigger problem
Ate farm fresh eggs at my grandparents farm for years and no problems
My case is just the opposite. I'm fine with scrambled, fried and poached eggs. But once I eat a hard-boiled egg I know I'm going to be in big trouble in a couple hours. I get bad stomach cramps followed by diarrhea and heartburn. I love my hard-boiled eggs. I usually buy the eggs already hard-boiled from the store. Will have to try fixing my own hard-boiled eggs and see if I still have problems.
Wow this is brilliant! I stumbled across this while trying to figure out why quiche makes me sick. The last ingredient I suspected was the egg but I'm thinking that's it. None of the other ingredients individually are a problem for me, and oddly, tasting the raw mixture was fine, but the baked quiche? Not much takes away my appetite but quiche omg (after getting sick a few times, even the smell as it's baking makes me queasy) it's so odd because I used to love quiche and objectively it's a delicious thing but now my brain associates the smell and taste with getting ill... My guess is it's something to do with what the eggs are baked with (maybe) and the fact that in quiche it's mixed, so essential it's baked scrambled eggs. I don't know.
Oh wow! My bad/good eggs were so much easier to identify. Good luck!!
Thank you for sharing your story for the world to see! Not many would be brave enough to do it. At this moment I am running back and forth to the bathroom for episodes and have an achy back almost like early back labor. I've been trying to figure out why I've been having these bouts the past couple years of diarrhea and now realize it is probably eggs. Your blog was one of the top results when I googled "eggs and diarrhea." And the brain fog! Some days I feel like I'm losing my mind and can hardly put the words together I'm trying to say. I don't seem to remember having a problem until we moved three years ago from the US to South Africa, but I am also in my 40's. It's possible for me it isn't about the location but the age. SA definitely doesn't clean their eggs prior to packaging for selling in the store. I am going to look into buying some directly from a farm though to test.
I also have had a problem with garlic for several years with my stomach just not feeling well after eating it, so several of the comments have been very helpful.
Like so many others, eggs in things like cookies and cakes are no problem at all . . . though the scale would show a lower number if I couldn't eat those things!
Thank you so much for sharing this Amy!
Your story helped me out so much cus I thought I was going crazy!
I have the exact same problem and I've been eating eggs without a problem my entire life!
I figured out very fast it was the eggs that made me sick and nothing else, but my question was.. why do some eggs make me so sick while others don't. They came right from the store and yet, they made me sick! It was literally Russian roulette. At first I thought I just had a stomach ache or something that the eggs made worse, but I started to get it more and more often and now I can barely eat an egg anymore. We tried everything.. with butter, without, scrambled, baked, with cheese, without cheese, without salt, nothing made a difference. Most of the time i ended up sick and exactly the same symptoms you describe; nausea, back pain, extreme stomach cramps, feeling feverish etc. for the entire day. I'm originally from the Netherlands and I ate eggs very frequently. Never ever got sick from them. Not from older eggs either. Here is the difference tho; In the Netherlands they dont wash the eggs. You get the eggs unwashed right from under the chickens butt, I never kept them in the fridge and most eggs we have are free ranged eggs. So I'm going to try unwashed fresh eggs from a friends coup and see how this goes for me. I miss eggs cus I love eggs! I don't have any problems with the eggs in cake or anything. For me its very clear that the problem lays in a handling difference. Either it is the washing, the chickens food, keeping them in the fridge (tho i know some people in the Netherlands who did that and it never got me sick either) or a combination of all of that.
Conventinal market eggs make me nauseous. Pasture raised eggs from chickens on their natural diets do not. The color of the egg has nothing to do with it though, dark eggs come from dark chickens, white eggs come from white chickens, that's it. It's all about the way the chicken has been raised, fed and treated. Free range pasture raised chickens get to actually BE chickens, they're not locked up in a dark box with 1000 other chickens and fed inflammatory grains and garbage, stressed out and fighting one another for personal space. They actually get to eat bugs and play outside, so their diet is healthier and they are happier. Think about how babies are reliant on what we eat while they are in the womb. If we eat poorly, they have developmental issues and nutrient deficiencies, the same goes for animals.
The color of the chicken does not determine the color the egg, that is determined by the breed of the chicken, but you are correct that the color of the egg is meaningless. Just a pretty change from white sometimes.
Hi Amy. Very interesting article. We are fortunate to be able to buy our eggs directly from a friend who has chickens. I did not read all the comments to know if this was brought up. You can’t have pasteurized hens, it is the eggs that you can pasteurize. ☺️
Ah, you are lucky! The closest I can get is eggs from a local CSA that buys from a farm upstate.
I'm not seeing any references to "pasteurized hens." I did see a couple misspellings of "pastured" in the comments but based on the surrounding sentences I believe they still meant "pastured," not "pasteurized." Based on how eggs are pasteurized, that definitely would not be a good process for hens to go through. :-D
I have almost the same problem. I ate eggs for breakfast for many years without issue. Starting about ten years ago I was quite achy with back problems and brain fog. It took awhile to figure out it was eggs. I quit eating them for a long time, but then found I could have them occasionally, though even this is risky and unpredictable... About two or three years ago I started eating egg beaters for breakfast and have been fine... The last few months I've been eating egg whites without issue, but today I'm a bit achy... When it happens, I switch to unsweetened oatmeal in the morning, and it fixes the problem almost immediately. For me its related to generalized inflammation... Eggs seem to make it worse. I think I need to get serious about cutting out refined sugars and other things that cause inflammation.
Registered Dietitian here! One reason the egg white that come in a carton don't make you sick is that they are pasteurized. Allergies are a reaction to a specific protein, heat denatures proteins, which makes sense that baked goods and well cooked efggs wouldn't bother you, and neither do the liquid egg whites. To really test if its egg whites you would have to scramble egg white from an actual egg and separate it from the yolk yourself. Of course, only with a doctor's recommendation per your tolerance and reaction- safety first!
Thanks Jessica, I've always wanted to test that but didn't want to purposely give myself that sick feeling again. :-D
Do you have any insight as to why the more expensive eggs from pastured chickens that I buy never make me sick, but the cheaper (and usually older) ones do?
Yes! This very much is a thing. I thought I was crazy. I have eaten eggs my entire life and they have never bothered me. We recently got our own hens, I was so excited with the prospect of free range, organic fresh eggs daily. Well twice I have made baked goods and baked eggs and I can't eat them because it feels like I can't digest them. I'm talking heartburn, bloating and indigestion. But store bought eggs don't bother me? I will experiment with scrambled eggs and see how that goes. Thank you for sharing your experiences with us.
Far out, I am so excited that I have come across this. A few times a year I have what I used to refer to as my 'random awful gut pain and swelling'. I've had scopes done, ultrasounds etc. I am currently nursing an awful bout that came on a couple hours after a cafe brunch and I realised that his always happens after cafe brunches and I always think 'it couldn't be what I ate, I eat bread and eggs all the time' but now it's all making sense! As a child I used to think poached eggs made me sick, but I only ever had them poached at restaurants! Wow, it's all coming together. I hope this is what it is and I never have to experience this again.
The pain and discomfort I get is across my mid section, at the bottom of my ribs. It feels like I'm swelling and expanding in there and it gives me a shocking backache, on top of nausea.Is this where everyone else experiencs the discomfort?
Thank you for posting this!!!
You're welcome! And yes, that feeling you describe is VERY familiar.
I thought I was the only one!! So glad that I found this article :)
I am familiar with a solid 80% of what you're describing, including the strange tolerance for eggs certain ways and intolerance for them other ways. Some additional notes where I differ a bit from your experiences:
- I have found it strange that I don't seem to be sensitive to eggs much at all when they're mixed in with other ingredients. I can eat bread, cakes, pancakes, pizza, until I'm blue in the face and have no problem. I don't know why this is.
- Scrambled eggs absolutely hit me for some reason (which sucks because I love them), but boiled eggs far less so. However, even with boiled eggs, I can't go hog wild. If I eat them too regularly whatever problem I have slowly creeps in.
- I am wondering if I'm sensitive to some chemical reaction that occurs when mixing the eggs with the yolks? It may not be one or the other by itself so much as some byproduct of the combination of the two? Scrambled eggs are the worst of the worst. Sometimes I'll get ill from a single serving of them, eating them regularly is unthinkable! Regular sunny side up fried eggs with runny yolk, however? Rarely will I have a problem with that, like boiled eggs. I have to over do it to make those an issue. The wrench in this little hypothesis is that all the things I mentioned in a previous point about eggs mixed into things not bothering me then should, shouldn't they? Like you, I'm no chemist, I can only report my individual experiences and look for patterns.
That's really interesting about the sunny-side-up eggs. I wonder if the whites are the problem? In my experience, when I make ssu eggs, the whites are really well cooked. More solid than when scrambled.
Thank you for posting this!
I have been sick for nearly 5 weeks. I've had 3 weeks off work and was at my witts end trying to find solutions. Pathology samples, testing for all sorts of things including coeliac and other autoimmune diseases. I even thought all my symptoms were to do with my adenomyosis. Doctor said its an elimination process - how fun. I went 6 days without eggs and I felt fine, so I tried it, and sure enough within 20 minutes I was vomiting!