What kind of eggs are the most nutritious?
By Felicia
When you go to the supermarket to buy eggs, there are many different types. There are organic eggs, free-run eggs, etc. These eggs can vary in price at the grocery store from about $2.75 per dozen to more than $7.49 per dozen, with many options in between. But which eggs are the most nutritious? That’s what we’re going to cover in this article.
Very recently, Marketplace held a study to see which eggs were the best for you. The least expensive ones that they tested were conventional eggs, and the most expensive were the organic ones.
The thing is, when it came to the organic eggs, not all of them tested equally. In Marketplace's test, organic eggs produced on small farms had more nutrients than the big-brand organic eggs sold at Canada's largest grocers under private labels and by two of the largest egg brands in the country.
Marketplace at random purchased two cartons each of several types of eggs from 14 brands from grocery stores across the Greater Toronto Area. In total, the team sent 29-dozen eggs to an accredited food science laboratory to test levels of cholesterol, protein and omega-3, as well as vitamins A, D and E.
For the first comparison, they tested conventional vs. big-brand eggs sold by some of the biggest grocers in Canada, Loblaws and Sobeys - as well as some of the biggest egg brands on the market - Burnbrae and LH Gray, which sells Gray Ridge and GoldEgg.
For most of the nutrients tested, there were no large differences between the cheaper conventional eggs and the more expensive organic options. However, there was one significant difference: the price. According to cbc.ca, conventional eggs cost an average of $3.23 per dozen, and organic eggs cost more than twice as much at $6.98 on average per dozen.
Plus, in fact, in some cases the conventional eggs had higher levels of some vitamins than their organic counterparts. This was the case for Burnbrae Naturegg organic eggs when compared to Burnbrae's cheaper Prestige eggs.
These are where conventional eggs come from
This is where organic eggs come from
The thing is, organic eggs are laid by hens that live in a free-range environment with access to the outdoors, while conventional ones are laid by hens in traditional cages. This means, overall, there is no nutritional difference between organic eggs and regular ones, but organic eggs are better for the hens themselves.