The new health study says there is no relation between eating eggs and heart attacks
Eggs contain high levels of cholesterol and for years people with heart disease in the family avoided them, fearing the risk of heart disease.
But a study of men prone to a genetic mutation that causes cardiovascular disease found a high cholesterol diet had no affect on their health, despite previous fears.
It will come as a relief to the poultry industry which has fought for years to persuade people that eggs are good for them and nutritious.
Six million people live with heart disease in England and Wales
In the 1960s Britons, inspired by the classic Go to work on an egg TV adverts, scoffed of them a week on average.
But this fell to fewer than two in the 1990s because of fears they raised cholesterol.
Now scientists have shown a relatively higher intake of dietary cholesterol, or eating an egg every day, is not associated with heart disease.
Frequent consumption did not increase the risk even in those people carrying the gene variant APOE4 which fails to metabolise the cholesterol properly.
Researchers looked at 1,032 men for the study that lasted 21 years
The key protein apolipoprotein E (APOE) transports and eliminates cholesterol from the body. But the mutation APOE4 allows more to remain in the blood.
The defective gene runs in families, so the researchers looked at 1,032 men in Finland where about a third of the population are carriers, a higher proportion than anywhere else in the world.
Those taking part were aged 42 to 60 and 32.5 percent of them had the APOE4 gene.
In the 1960s Britons ate eggs regularly
They were healthy when they signed up for the Kuopio ischaemic heart disease risk factor study, KIHD, between 1984 and 1989.
During 21 years of follow-up checks, 230 had a heart attack.
The study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, also failed to establish a link between eating eggs and the thickening of blood vessel walls, which increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
Eating an egg every day is not associated with heart disease
An extra 600 people a week die in Britain from heart disease during the coldest months of the year, figures show.
Around 3,000 die of the condition between December and March – 23 per cent more than the average quarterly total for the rest of the year, the British Heart Foundation reports.
Six million people live with heart disease in England and Wales and it is blamed for a quarter of deaths.
Cold weather raises risks because the body works harder to keep warm.