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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from how stuff works dot com

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Speaker 1: where smart Happens. I am Marshall Brain with today's question,

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Speaker 1: how can an egg carton claim that the contained eggs

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Speaker 1: have less fat and more vitamin E than another egg?

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Speaker 1: Eggs seem like they should be a commodity item, with

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Speaker 1: one egg being about the same as any other. But

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Speaker 1: if you've been to a grocery store lately, you know

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Speaker 1: that egg types are proliferating. You can buy eggs based

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Speaker 1: on their size and color, as well as the organic

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Speaker 1: content of the feed the chickens eat, the amount of

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Speaker 1: freedom the chickens have while they're eating, and so on.

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Speaker 1: And now farmers are starting to differentiate their eggs using

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Speaker 1: nutritional claims. It turns out that the eggs you bought

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Speaker 1: are patented, and the patent reveals that all of the

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Speaker 1: benefits come from the diet fed to the chickens. What

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Speaker 1: a chicken eats has a significant effect on what ends

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Speaker 1: up in that chicken's egg. By feeding the chicken a

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Speaker 1: diet rich in vitamin E and low and saturated fat,

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Speaker 1: the eggs end up being high in vitamin E and

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Speaker 1: low and saturated fat. There are two other ways that

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Speaker 1: a farmer or breeder could change the contents of an egg.

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Speaker 1: One way involves the traditional selective breeding approach. If the

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Speaker 1: farmer were to analyze eggs from a hundred chickens and

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Speaker 1: find the chickens that produced eggs with, for example, the

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Speaker 1: lowest amount of cholesterol, the farmer could then breed just

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Speaker 1: those chickens with each other. By repeating this process over

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Speaker 1: several generations, the farmer may be able to create a

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Speaker 1: stable line of chickens that have lower amounts of cholesterol

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Speaker 1: in their eggs. Farmers use this technique all the time

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Speaker 1: for all kinds of farm products. For example, they breathe

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Speaker 1: the sweetest corn plants in an attempt to make sweet

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Speaker 1: corn sweeter, and so on. The other way would involve

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Speaker 1: some form of genetic engineering in which one or more

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Speaker 1: genes are added to or subtracted from the chickens DNA

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Speaker 1: for more illness, and thousands of other topics. Because it

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Speaker 1: how stuff works, dot Com