First Comes the Egg

Imagine whipping up a few eggs for breakfast in the morning and that’s your medicine for the day.

Granted, these are no ordinary eggs. These eggs are the creation of Shengmin Sang and his research team at N.C. A&T’s Center for Excellence in Post-Harvest Technologies at the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis.

These eggs — rich in polyphenols known to be strong antioxidants and anti-inflammatory agents — come from laying hens at the N.C. A&T University Farm that have been fed a special diet containing apple and orange peels.

Eggs like these could help prevent the development of cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, even age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s.

And, if Sang has his way, eggs like these could one day be available at your neighborhood grocery store.

“The research focus of my lab is to provide scientific evidence to support food as medicine, which is a cost-effective strategy to reduce the health-care burden,” said Sang, Ph.D., a distinguished professor of functional foods and human health. “We focus on gut health and the prevention of metabolic diseases.

Research Associate Shuwei Zhang runs tests as part of his role in the creation of eggs that are rich in polyphenols, which contain strong antioxidants and anti-inflammatory agents.

“Our goal is to use a ‘precision nutrition’ approach to identify the right food for the right populations at the right time. Whether we are healthy or ill, whether we are young or old, our nutritional needs vary, and precision nutrition can help address these unique requirements.”

Sang, a prolific researcher who holds several patents, began studying herbal medicine 20 years ago in China, where he received his doctorate in organic chemistry from the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He then completed his postdoctoral training studying food bioactives at  Rutgers University in New Jersey.

“I was trained as a natural product chemist to identify bioactive compounds in herbal medicines. We’ve used these medicines in China for thousands of years to treat different diseases, before we got Western medicine,” he said.

“At Rutgers, I started to look at active compounds in foods. We call them ‘functional foods’ because they serve the function of providing some health benefit, beyond the basic nutrients.”

Sang embarked on his current project —”Using special feeding techniques to develop polyphenol-rich functional eggs” — after achieving promising results in a pilot study that added different doses of gingerol-rich ginger extract to the feed of laying hens. Sang’s team, managed by Research Associate Shuwei Zhang, Ph.D., collected eggs daily for four weeks and developed methods to quantify the concentrations of gingerols, shogaols and their major metabolites in the egg whites and yokes.

Shengmin Sang, Ph.D., a distinguished professor of functional foods and human health, seated, and his team (from left, Xiaolin Liu, research technician; Shuwei Zhang, research associate; and Sara De la Cruz, a master’s student in Food & Nutritional Sciences at N.C. A&T,) are researching the creation of eggs that are rich in strong antioxidants and anti-inflammatory agents.

“We were able to detect these active compounds in the egg. That proved our idea is feasible,” Sang explained. The results also suggested that the bioavailability of polyphenols is a critical factor for developing polyphenol-rich functional eggs.

With a three-year, $800,000 USDA grant from the Evans Allen Research Program, Sang is now studying whether other major dietary polyphenols are bioavailable in eggs, and whether the special feed actually may improve the performance of the laying hens and egg quality.

“We may also be able to reduce the cholesterol level in the eggs, because polyphenols can reduce cholesterol levels in humans,” Sang said.

Co-PI Y ewande Fasina, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Animal Sciences at A&T, is assisting with the laying hen trials. Co-PI Jianmei Yu, Ph.D., a food and nutrition researcher in A&T’s Department of Family and Consumer Sciences, is overseeing sensory testing of the eggs.

Sang applied for a provisional patent for his functional egg idea and plans to submit a full patent application. Patented or not, his long-term goal is to make polyphenol-rich eggs commercially available in the future.

“We are looking for an industry partner who has the same interest so we can commercialize. The goal would be to make the polyphenol eggs available in the supermarket. We don’t want to make the egg like gold — too expensive. By using industry waste, our goal also is for you to get the eggs at an affordable price.”

So are Sang’s eggs as yummy as those found on the market today? So far, so good on that front, too.

Sara De la Cruz, a master’s student in food and nutritional sciences at A&T who works in Sang’s lab, helped oversee sensory testing on the first batch of eggs in April. Sixty panelists judged the hard-boiled eggs for color, taste, texture, smell and overall liking. The preliminary results are promising, she said.

“It was fun. People were trying to guess which were the samples treated with apple and orange peels, and which were the control samples,” she said. “Basically we didn’t see any statistical differences, which is good.”

Sang, who hopes to have initial results on his functional eggs by the end of this year, views his quest to enhance one of America’s favorite breakfast foods as a common-sense approach to improving the current health-care system.

“As we know, most drugs have side effects. They can cause damage to your body, plus many are quite expensive. Additionally, many chronic diseases are preventable, as they take time to develop,” he said. “Eggs are a staple food. And eggs are a big market. Using food as medicine to prevent disease instead of treating disease is a perfect strategy.”