For me the most surprising result in the infographics is that raw eggs should have so much suffering per serving. I tried to dig into the data to work out why this might be, and either I’m misunderstanding it – very possible! – or this result is a bit misleading.
The full “Per-Serving Impact on Lives and Days of Suffering” data gives raw eggs a 10.3 for total suffering per serving, and boiled/fried/scrambled only around 4-5. So that means the serving size for raw eggs must be twice as big.
But this doesn’t make sense. If I want to eat three eggs in scrambled form, I simply need to eat a plate of scrambled eggs. But if I want to eat three eggs in “baked good” form, I need to eat an entire cake – which hopefully I’m not doing too often even during a pandemic.
I can’t find any reference to raw eggs in baked goods in the “Merged Impact & Consumption Data” spreadsheet. However, they are mentioned in the original “2015-2016 FNDDS At A Glance—FNDDS Ingredients” spreadsheet: under various types of “Cakes and pies”, this gives an ingredient weight for eggs of 150g i.e. the amount you’d put in a whole cake. Is it possible this has mistakenly filtered through as a serving size, resulting in the elevated figure for suffering per serving, when in fact 150g of raw eggs represents maybe 10 servings of cake?
I think you’re right, that one does seem to be a bit misleading… thank you for calling my attention to that. It looks like an eccentricity in the NHANES data. While it has things like cakes and pies with eggs in them as one type of food respondents could report, it also allowed them to report foods in terms of their constituent ingredients. So you could report a ham and cheese sandwich as a ham and cheese sandwich OR as sliced ham, sliced cheese, mayo, and bread. Because we restricted our analysis to just the primary animal product in each report, raw eggs are a bit of an odd case...the specific foods in that category are “Egg, yolk only, raw”, “Egg, white only, raw”, and “Egg drop soup.” It’s actually the soup that’s the problem, because the ingredient list has it categorized as its own sole ingredient (egg drop soup, made up 100% of egg drop soup!). That’s definitely a problem since it ended up assigning the entire weight of a serving of soup to the egg. I think the best option is probably just to remove raw egg as a category entirely, but I’ll double-check and consult the rest of the team first.
For me the most surprising result in the infographics is that raw eggs should have so much suffering per serving. I tried to dig into the data to work out why this might be, and either I’m misunderstanding it – very possible! – or this result is a bit misleading.
The full “Per-Serving Impact on Lives and Days of Suffering” data gives raw eggs a 10.3 for total suffering per serving, and boiled/fried/scrambled only around 4-5. So that means the serving size for raw eggs must be twice as big.
But this doesn’t make sense. If I want to eat three eggs in scrambled form, I simply need to eat a plate of scrambled eggs. But if I want to eat three eggs in “baked good” form, I need to eat an entire cake – which hopefully I’m not doing too often even during a pandemic.
I can’t find any reference to raw eggs in baked goods in the “Merged Impact & Consumption Data” spreadsheet. However, they are mentioned in the original “2015-2016 FNDDS At A Glance—FNDDS Ingredients” spreadsheet: under various types of “Cakes and pies”, this gives an ingredient weight for eggs of 150g i.e. the amount you’d put in a whole cake. Is it possible this has mistakenly filtered through as a serving size, resulting in the elevated figure for suffering per serving, when in fact 150g of raw eggs represents maybe 10 servings of cake?
I think you’re right, that one does seem to be a bit misleading… thank you for calling my attention to that. It looks like an eccentricity in the NHANES data. While it has things like cakes and pies with eggs in them as one type of food respondents could report, it also allowed them to report foods in terms of their constituent ingredients. So you could report a ham and cheese sandwich as a ham and cheese sandwich OR as sliced ham, sliced cheese, mayo, and bread. Because we restricted our analysis to just the primary animal product in each report, raw eggs are a bit of an odd case...the specific foods in that category are “Egg, yolk only, raw”, “Egg, white only, raw”, and “Egg drop soup.” It’s actually the soup that’s the problem, because the ingredient list has it categorized as its own sole ingredient (egg drop soup, made up 100% of egg drop soup!). That’s definitely a problem since it ended up assigning the entire weight of a serving of soup to the egg. I think the best option is probably just to remove raw egg as a category entirely, but I’ll double-check and consult the rest of the team first.
Thanks for the feedback!
Best,
Jo