Eggs A Nearly Perfect Food

If you ask a food historian your which-came-first question, you'll likely get a serious answer.

Fact is, it wasn't a chicken that laid that first breakfast egg, all those 6,000 years ago.

It was a goose, or maybe a duck, and it was in China. According to poultry historians, it would be another 2,000 years before our classic laying hen made her appearance -- in India, no less.

Eggs were finally introduced to the western world during the fifth century, brought here by sailors who wisely kept a few hens on their ships. The day the first laying hen landed in North America should have gone down in history, right along with Christopher Columbus.

Eggs are a nearly perfect food, containing almost every nutrient essential to sustaining life -- thus their role as total life support for the embryonic chick.

The protein in egg white is of such high quality that it has become the standard against which other proteins are judged.

Egg yolk contains a great whack of vitamins and minerals including vitamin A, B12, D, E, riboflavin, folic acid, iron, zinc and phosphorus, selenium and choline. It is one of the few sources of vitamin K.

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