Nduta Wambura is a food, nutrition and dietetics graduate from Kenyatta University and a registered nutritionist and dietitian by the Kenya Nutritionists and Dietitians Institute. She teams up with other professionals at Ask The Nutritionist to have all your health and lifestyle questions answered! Here she writes on the facts about quail eggs:

Almost everyone in Kenya has heard the craze that caught people about quail eggs and how they should begin keeping quail birds since they are much better nutritionally. Ideally most people believe that quail eggs are the miracle food that anyone has made in a long time! Most believe that if they take it they will improve their brain power, become more healthy, their diseases will go within a day and so on.

But how true is this? Well, just like the way we consume fish and obtain benefits of it, quail eggs have to be taken over time for any nutritional goal to be achieved! Doing my research to support the claims that have been made to people about the benefits of the egg, I have not found any scientific research that backs up their benefits. Infact, all claims that have been made over the internet seem to have come from farmers and producers of the egss who aim to make money out of innocence.

But since this article is meant to compare quail eggs with chicken eggs, lets stick to the subject.

If you do a simple Google search of the nutritional value of chicken eggs compared to quail eggs you will be surprised to find the results indicating that quail eggs have far much more cholestrol as compared to chicken eggs. In fact taking just one is not enough, not to mention the expense of about 70 shillings per egg compared to the normal 10 to 12 bob for a chicken egg.

Put aside what you have heard or been told and look at the following nutritional information:

Then look at the following information about chicken eggs:

So for one, let no one lie to you that you can loose weight through eating quail eggs.Their cholesterol level is 844mg compared to the 372mg of the same amount of eggs! That aside the claims about healing anaemia, anti-aging, immunity boosting, weight loss and all other hearsays are simply hearsays! They have not been scientifically proven yet and one can only rely on them at their own peril!

The key to healthy living is through eating variety of foods to reach health goals. Pinning this on one “magic food” fails to meet the major idea of having varieties of food on our plate to achieve healthy goals!

[This article first appeared on Ask The Nutritionist – check our their great site and loads of helpful articles there. We’re very grateful that Nduta has also written for Conversation Magazine – look out for “Understanding the fats in your diet” in CM Issue 2.]