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The yolk is where almost all the "good" stuff in the eggs resides. Throwing the yolk of the 1-2 eggs you eat per day away, as people have been doing it for decades is thus madness.

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Table 1: Typical Composition of Egg Phospholipids | FA, fatty acid; LysoPC, lysophosphatidylcholine; LysoPE, lysophospha-tidylethanolamine; PC, phosphatidylcholine; PE, phospha-tidylethanolamine; PI, phosphatidylinositol; PL, phospholipid; SM, sphingomyelin. (Blesso. 2015)

"PL are key components of all biological membranes and are abundantly found in the diet, primarily as glycerophospholipid and sphingolipid classes. Dietary glycerophospholipids are made up of two fatty acids (FA), a glycerol backbone, a phosphate group, and a polar organic molecule (choline, serine, inositol, or ethanolamine).[...] The average large egg contains approximately 1.3 g of PL, which are almost exclusively found in the yolk. 

An egg breakfast improves the levels of triglycerides in active indiv. compared to an isocaloric bagel breakfast (Clayton. 2015).

Egg vs. oatmeal (more) and egg vs. bagel: You will probably still remember my recent article about a study by Ballesteros, et al. (2015) showing that an egg per day improves inflammation when compared to an oatmeal-based breakfast without increasing other cardiometabolic risk factors not just in healthy, but even in diabetic patients (read more | Ballesteros. 2015). In a similar, but more complex study, Clayton et al. (2015) found that compared to an isoenergetic breakfast with bagels, a daily breakfasts that includes two eggs will improve plasma triglycerides in active (resistance training) men and women.

A typical Western diet contains about 2–8 g of dietary PL per day. Estimates of average egg intake in the U.S. indicate that egg-derived PL contributes 10%–40% (or 0.8 g) of daily consumed PL. The major PL species found in egg include PC, phosphatidylethanolamine (PE), SM, and phosphatidylinositol (PI). The typical PL composition of egg is shown in Table 1, which reveals PC as the predominant species making up almost three quarters of the total PL. The typical FA compositions of egg PL species vary and are shown in Table 1" (Blesso. 2015).

• Eggs have beneficial effects on cholesterol in your cells | learn more

  decrease serum cholesterol levels in rats (Murata. 1982) and a reduction of the intestinal absorption of cholesterol (Jiang. 2001), 
• improve memory retention and increase acetylcholine concentrations, a neurotransmitter that decreases in concentration in cases of Alzheimer’s disease (Masuda. 1998;  Favreliere. 2003), as well as 
• improve liver function, and cancer prevention (Gutierrez. 1997),

• Table 2: Biological acitivities of egg proteins (Kovacs-Nolan. 2005)

  yolk proteins - ovalbumin, ovotranserin, ovucoid, ovomucin, lysozyme, as well as ovoinhibitor, vomacroglobulin, ovomacroglobulin and avidin have antibacterial activity and antihypertensive, immunomodulating, antiadhesive (=interferes with a key step of inflammation), antitumor, and antiviral activities (to find out what does what, check out Table 2 from Kovacs-Nolan. 2005);
• immunoglobulins - specifically immunoglobolin Y from egg yolk which has been shown to have antibacterial activity, antiviral activity, can reduce the incidence of dental caries, is used in anti-venoms, acts as an anti-inflammatory agent, and serves as a carrier for anti-cancer drugs (Mine. 2004);
• other components of the yolk - including phosvitin, sialyloligosaccharides and sialylglycopeptides, as well as the yolk lipids, lipoproteins, fatty acids, and cholesterol have scientifically proven antioxidant and antibacterial activities, as well (Kovacs-Nolan. 2005)

Men and women with familial hypercholesterolemia have a lack of / defective LDL receptors and a defective regulation of  the endogenous cholesterol production. For them reducing the intake of cholesterol and taking statins is in fact a good idea (Goldstein. 2015). The same may go for people with various other specific genetic polymorphisms a dozen of which have recently been summarized by Abdullah et al. (2015).

For 99% of us, there's no reason to be afraid of the cholesterol in eggs: Unfortunately, there's a small portion of the population whose genes predispose them to "abnormal" increases in serum cholesterol in response to increased cholesterol intake. Next to familial hypercholesterolemia (Goldstein. 2015), there are a number of other - albeit less threatening - polymorphisms (e.g. the ABCG5 polymorphism | Herron. 2006; see Abdullah. 2015 for a summary) which may explain why most (e.g. Nakamura. 2006), but not all studies refute the claim that an increased egg consumption triggers increases in cholesterol and subsequent increases in CVD risk in healthy indiv.

If you take a look at more general studies, and the negligible 0.38% increase of the LDL:HDL ratio McNamara et al. (2000) calculated per 100mg increase in cholesterol intake in their meta-analysis it is no wonder that all, not just "egg centered" epidemiological studies show that "dietary cholesterol is not related to coronary heart disease incidence or mortality across or within populations" (McNamara. 2000).

This does not mean that I recommend consuming 20 whole eggs per day. Especially for those of you who consume high amounts of carbohydrates, this may turn your diet into a highly unfavorable high fat + high carbohydrate diet, but 1-2 whole eggs a day ain't no problem; irrespective of what the rest of your diet looks like (assuming you don't belong to the previously mentioned group of people who are genetically disposed to have problems with their lipid metabolism) | Comment! 

• Abdullah, Mohammad MH, Peter JH Jones, and Peter K. Eck. "Nutrigenetics of cholesterol metabolism: observational and dietary intervention studies in the postgenomic era." Nutrition reviews (2015): nuv016.
• Ballesteros, Martha Nydia, et al. "One Egg per Day Improves Inflammation when Compared to an Oatmeal-Based Breakfast without Increasing Other Cardiometabolic Risk Factors in Diabetic Patients." Nutrients 7.5 (2015): 3449-3463.
• Blesso, Christopher N. "Egg Phospholipids and Cardiovascular Health." Nutrients 7.4 (2015): 2731-2747.
• Clayton, Zachary S., et al. "Influence of Resistance Training Combined with Daily Consumption of an Egg-based or Bagel-based Breakfast on Risk Factors for Chronic Diseases in Healthy Untrained Individuals." Journal of the American College of Nutrition 34.2 (2015): 113-119.
• Favreliere, S., et al. "DHA-enriched phospholipid diets modulate age-related alterations in rat hippocampus." Neurobiology of aging 24.2 (2003): 233-243.
• Goldstein, Joseph L., and Michael S. Brown. "A Century of Cholesterol and Coronaries: From Plaques to Genes to Statins." Cell 161.1 (2015): 161-172.
• Gutierrez, M. A., H. Takahashi, and L. R. Juneja. "Nutritive evaluation of hen eggs." Hen eggs, their basic and applied science. 2nd ed. CRC Press, New York (1997): 25-35.
• Herron, Kristin L., et al. "The ABCG5 polymorphism contributes to individual responses to dietary cholesterol and carotenoids in eggs." The Journal of nutrition 136.5 (2006): 1161-1165.
• Jiang, Yongzhi, Sang K. Noh, and Sung I. Koo. "Egg phosphatidylcholine decreases the lymphatic absorption of cholesterol in rats." The Journal of nutrition 131.9 (2001): 2358-2363.
• Kovacs-Nolan, Jennifer, Marshall Phillips, and Yoshinori Mine. "Advances in the value of eggs and egg components for human health." Journal of agricultural and food chemistry 53.22 (2005): 8421-8431.
• Masuda, Y., et al. "Egg phosphatidylcholine combined with vitamin B 12 improved memory impairment following lesioning of nucleus basalis in rats." Life sciences 62.9 (1998): 813-822.
• McNamara, Donald J. "The impact of egg limitations on coronary heart disease risk: do the numbers add up?." Journal of the American College of Nutrition 19.sup5 (2000): 540S-548S.
• Mine, Yoshinori, and Jennifer Kovacs-Nolan. "Biologically active hen egg components in human health and disease." The Journal of Poultry Science 41.1 (2004): 1-29.
• Murata, Masakazu, Katsumi Imaizumi, and Michihiro Sugano. "Effect of dietary phospholipids and their constituent bases on serum lipids and apolipoproteins in rats." The Journal of nutrition 112.9 (1982): 1805-1808.
• Nakamura, Yasuyuki, et al. "Egg consumption, serum total cholesterol concentrations and coronary heart disease incidence: Japan Public Health Center-based prospective study." British Journal of Nutrition 96.05 (2006): 921-928.
• World Health Organization. Global Status Report on Noncommunicable Diseases 2010; World Health Organization: Geneva, Switzerland, 2011.

Yes, blueberry smoothies are heart healthier than those without blueberries, but can't replace blood pressure meds.

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• We don't see the dietary mistakes we make (Sproesser. 2015) - In contrast to our perception of physical weaknesses like love-handles and co our perception of our eating habits is often not critical enough. According to a recent study from the University of Konstanz in Germany, people considered what they ate always healthier than what others ate, even if an objective assessment said that there were no significant differences.
  

  Figure 1: Annotated photo of the foods subjects chose from when they put together the meals for themselves and their peers (Sproesser. 2015).

  What is particularly interesting is that this became a self-fulfilling prophecy, when the participants were asked to compose a meal for their peers and chose (a) more energy for a peer than for themselves (M = 4983 kJ or 1191 kcal on average for the peers’ meals vs. M = 3929 kJ or 939 kcal on average for the own meals) and (b) more high-caloric food items for a typical meal - a behavior that is highly indicative of a so-called "self-other bias", which would confirm that at least many of us really think they were eating healthy even if that's in stark contrast to epidemiological data indicating overall unhealthy eating habits.
• Egg yolk protein delays, egg ovalbumin (the white stuff) boosts the recovery of your iron levels (Kobayashi. 2015) - In spite of the fact that the study at hand was conducted in female rats, it's safe to assume that the yolk and white protein will have different effects on iron absorption and thus the the induction of iron deficiencies in man and women on low iron diets, too.
  

  Figure 2: Body weight gain, food intake, hematocrit, hemaglobin and red blood cell count in response to different iron deficient diets compared to control = iron sufficient diet (Kobayashi. 2015).

  In other words, if you are eating 20 full yolks per day and your iron-levels are suppressed, you may reconsider this practice. If it's just the occasional egg yolk, let alone egg protein powder (which is usually ovalbumin, only), don't worry. 
• Blueberries are good for the heart, but they are no replacement for your blood pressure meds (Stull. 2015) - ed. In a recent double-blind and placebo-controlled study was conducted in 44 adults (blueberry, n = 23; and placebo, n = 21). The subjects were randomized to receive a blueberry or placebo smoothie twice daily for six weeks.
  

  Table 1:  Nutritional composition and ingredients in the smoothies (Stull. 2015).

  A snack that didn't have any effects on either the blood pressure or the insulin sensitivity of the >20 year-old subjects suffering from metabolic syndrome. That the blueberry smoothie still had beneficial effects on the endothelial function of the subjects can be seen by the improvements in reactive hyperemia index (RHI - an index that is among other things used for the noninvasive identification of patients with early coronary atherosclerosis" | Bonetti. 2004), which remained statistically significant even after adjusting for confounding factors, i.e., the percent body fat and gender.
  
  Accordingly, the study does support the notion that eating blueberries - even in form of a smoothie - can have beneficial effects on your heart health. In view of the fact that in this particular study a comparison of no-blueberry vs. blue-berry smoothies was conducted, you could also argue that the inclusion of blueberries in a smoothie may smooth out the negative effects of another (unnecessary) snack on your health and suggest: If you want to eat blueberries don't add them as a snack, but use them as a replacement for other foods.

Is Noneliac Gluten Sensitivity Legit? A Recently Published Review of the Latest Scientific Evidence on NCGS by Alex Leaf (Guestpost) May Help You Decide Whether you Even Want to Do the Painstaking Test | more

What? A, yes, the PLUS: How to diagnose gluten sensitivity? Well, as Catassi et al. point out, "[a] full diagnostic procedure should assess the clinical response to the gluten-free diet (GFD) and measure the effect of a gluten challenge after a period of treatment with the GFD" (Catassi. 2015). As a clinical evaluation tool the scientists suggest that the patient uses a self-administered instrument incorporating a modified version of the Gastrointestinal Symptom Rating Scale (see it). The test is then used during a double-blind placebo-controlled gluten challenge (8 g/day): One week on gluten / placebo is followed by a one-week washout on a strict gluten-free diet (GFD) that is, again, followed by 7 days on either 8g of gluten or placebo (depending on what was administered on day 1).

To make sure you don't mess up the results by using a placebo that may promote another gastrointestinal problem like small intestinal bacteria overgrowth as Jane pointed out in a comment on this article if you use the rice starch which is what Catasi et al. suggest, it may be wise to use something as innocent as EAA powder as your placebo.

Whatever you use as a placebo, NCGS, i.e. non-celiac gluten sensitivity, as scientists call the symptoms that occur in people who are non-celiac, is then diagnosed if there is at least a variation of 30% of one to three main symptoms between the gluten and the placebo challenge | Comment on Facebook!