May is “National Egg Month” and Iowa celebrates after once again gaining the top spot in egg production. Iowa was the top egg producer in the 1950s and ’60s, but Kevin Vinchattle, executive director of the Iowa Egg Council, says states to our south and west pushed ahead in production in the 1970s and ’80s.Iowa is also the nation’s leading egg processing state, with huge operations which break eggs and sell the liquid, even separating whites from yolks for some customers.Vinchattle says Iowa has about 31-million laying hens, compared to 30-million in Ohio. About seven-and-a-half billion eggs are produced in Iowa every year. About 30 percent of the eggs laid in Iowa are sold whole, in the shell. The rest are broken and processed. Egg Council spokesperson Holly Sorge says new health information on eggs has given the industry a boost.She says the American Heart Association changed its guidelines to say it’s now okay to eat an egg-a-day, prior to that they’d recommended you eat only three or four yolks per week. She says other research backs up the Heart Association.New research shows that cholesterol is not a problem in a person’s diet, its saturated fat, which Sorge says is good news for people wanting to eat eggs.
