Are Brown Eggs Better for You?

Nowadays, there isn’t just one kind of egg — brown, white, blue, and green eggs speckle the store’s egg section with a visually delightful array of colors. But after you cook or bake these eggs, can you decipher the difference? Or are the benefits of different colored eggs only shell deep?

It all comes down to the hen. Different breeds create different colored shells, but these eggs don’t have an altered nutritional value. In fact, when you crack a colored egg, you’ll see the inside is completely pristine white. Why do eggs get these colors? All eggs start out as white, it’s only during the last 24 hours of gestation inside the shell gland pouch that the eggs from these hens undergo an extra process of incubation which alters the outermost exterior color.

To make this color transformation happen, the breed of hen eats a lot. In fact, the cost of running a farm with brown egg-producing hens isn’t cost-effective. As if in protest against the cheaper producing white egg farms, the prestige of brown-colored eggs came through marketing thirty years prior. Call it a love of stories, but the idea that brown eggs come from hens in wide-open fields is as fake as any fairytale. The notion plays into people’s preconceived notion that natural colors are obviously healthier to consume. Buying a carton of brown-colored eggs was imbued with notions of humanity as if the hens were treated with more care but that was all the result of marketing.

Natural colored eggs are now also produced by large-scale farms. At the end of the day, colored eggs don’t have better nutritional value and the cost difference is simply because these specialty hens require more feed to produce eggs.