Eat eggs and cut your cholesterol, too.

Everywhere you look, health organizations are urging Americans to reduce their intake of saturated fat and cholesterol. For people who like eggs for breakfast, this can be a real problem, because a typical low-fat, low-cholesterol diet allows only four eggs per week.

To make such people happier about adopting a more healthful diet, researchers at a company named C.R. Eggs, Inc., in King of Prussia, Pa., have developed an egg with 15 percent less saturated fat than regular eggs. Working with physicians at the Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, they have found that people on cholesterol-lowering diets could reduce their cholesterol counts and still eat 12 of the modified eggs per week.

The investigators, led by Jeffrey L. Garwin of C.R. Eggs, studied 98 people with moderately high serum cholesterol whose physicians had put them on identical diets. The researchers asked 48 of the volunteers to break their diets and eat 12 of the modified eggs per week; they told the other 50 to eat no eggs. After six weeks, they found that both groups cholestero counts had dropped roughly 9 percent.

Garwin says his company reduces the fat content of its eggs by feeding laying hens a grain-based diet supplemented with canola oil, vitamin, E and iodine-rich kelp. Currently, he says, most hens are fed everything from leftover bakery crumbs to used deep-frying fat from fast-food restaurants. C.R. Eggs plans to begin marketing the reduced-fat eggs later this year, he says.