A new study has found that people are significantly more likely to give money to charity after eating the equivalent of a triple-egg omelette.

Eggs are brimming with amino acids, and provide us with every vitamin we need except C. Researchers in the Netherlands now believe that one of those amino acids – tryptophan, or TRP – plays a key role in the production of the “mood” chemical serotonin, and makes people more generous. For their study, they gave 16 people levels of powdered TRP equivalent to those found in three eggs; while 16 other men and women were given a placebo powder. All were then given a fee of a dollar for taking part in the study, and asked whether they’d be willing to donate some of it to charity; boxes for various big name organisations, including Unicef and the World Wildlife Fund, had been left out to facilitate this. When the researchers emptied out the boxes at the end, they found the TRP people had, on average, given a dollar; the rest had given just 50 cents.

My Comment
A further study of 120,300 Orkney Islanders found that, after adding a helping of french fries to an omelette, 4 people gave up reading a daily newspaper. Tiny surveys might or might not be meaningful.