Do Eggs Cause Constipation in Children?

Written and clinically reviewed by Bahee Van de Bor, RD, BCAPSc PGDipDiet, Specialist Paediatric Dietitian, former specialist dietitian at Great Ormond Street Hospital, with over 20 years of clinical experience in paediatric digestive health.

This is a guide for parents of constipated children, written by a paediatric dietitian.

Your child lives on eggs. Your child is also constipated. And someone, somewhere, has told you the two are connected.

If your child is a picky eater, I suspect the eggs are not an accident either. You have been offering them, encouraging them, possibly counting them, because eggs are protein and you are worried about whether your child is eating enough.

Let me take the egg worry off your plate. Then I want to show you a better question than the one you came here with.

Do eggs cause constipation in children?

For most children, no.

I am a paediatric dietitian, so everything below is about children specifically.

Constipation in a four-year-old is a different beast from constipation in an adult, and the answers are not interchangeable.

Eggs are protein and fat.

They contain no fibre, which is true and worth knowing. But eating an egg does not normally harden stool or slow the bowel down.

“Contains no fibre” is not the same as “causes constipation”.

Chicken contains no fibre. Cheese contains no fibre. Nobody blames the roast dinner.

So in most of the children I see, the egg is not what is driving things. What matters far more is the pattern around it.

Do eggs kept in the fridge cause constipation?

No. And I want to deal with this one directly, because I have seen parents told it in all seriousness.

There is no credible mechanism by which storing an egg in the fridge makes a child’s stools harder.

Nothing about the temperature of an egg before you cook it changes what happens in your child’s bowel afterwards.

Fridge, room temperature, boiled, scrambled, poached. It makes no difference to constipation.

If you have been carefully taking eggs out an hour before breakfast, you can stop. That hour is yours again.

So why do people say it?

I have a theory about the wider myth, and I will flag it as a theory rather than a fact.

Eggs bind. In a kitchen that means they hold a burger together, stop a fishcake collapsing, turn flour and butter into a cake. It is one of the first things anyone learns about eggs.

And “binding” has a second, unrelated meaning. Foods that bind you up.

Same word, two different jobs. I suspect a fair bit of this comes from that collision, though I cannot prove it.

What I can tell you is that I am not aware of any credible evidence that the culinary binding property of eggs has anything to do with constipation.

And taking eggs off a picky child’s plate on that basis costs you something real.

Are eggs low FODMAP for children?

Plain eggs are naturally low in FODMAPs, because FODMAPs are types of carbohydrate and eggs are protein and fat.

So plain eggs can usually stay in during a low FODMAP trial.

What they are cooked and served with is more likely to matter than the egg itself.

That is worth knowing when a child is already eating a narrow diet, because it is one fewer thing to take away.

If your child does seem to react after an egg-based meal, look at the whole plate rather than assuming the egg did it.

Depending on your child and how much they ate, something else in the meal may be relevant.

But symptoms after one meal still do not establish a food intolerance, and that is worth holding on to before anything gets removed.

Why eggs get the blame

Eggs get blamed because eggs are visible.

And in many of the families I see, they are visible because a parent has deliberately put them there.

This is the part I want to say gently, because it is one of the kindest mistakes in paediatric nutrition.

If your child is a picky eater, you are almost certainly worried about whether they are eating enough.

So you look at the short list of foods they accept and reach for the one with protein in it. Eggs are soft, quick, cheap, and they actually get eaten.

Breakfast, then the packed lunch, then the safe option at dinner when nothing else is going down.

You are not being anxious. You are doing what a sensible parent does with a child who will not eat.

But that is how eggs end up present at every difficult moment.

There at the tummy ache, there on the day nothing comes out. When one food is at the scene of every incident, the human brain does what human brains do.

What if removing eggs seemed to help?

If you took eggs out and your child got better, something real happened. I believe you. The question is what else changed at the same time.

Think back to that week.

Did you start offering more fruit, because you were suddenly paying close attention to what they ate?

What about fluids, did their drinks go up?

Did the GP start a laxative around then?

Did the school holidays begin, so your child was relaxed, at home, and near their own toilet?

Any of those could explain why the constipation improved without the egg being the cause.

The more useful question: what did the egg replace?

Here is the reframe, and it is the point of this article.

The question you arrived with is “are eggs constipating my child?” The more useful one is “what did the egg replace?”

Because this is what I see in clinic.

The egg that replaced the toast

A parent tells me breakfast is scrambled egg. Just scrambled egg.

No toast, because the child did not want it, or because the egg felt like the nutritious part and the bread felt like filler.

That breakfast has almost no fibre in it.

The same egg on two slices of wholemeal toast adds roughly four grams.

For a three-year-old whose daily target is fifteen grams, that is more than a quarter of the day covered before nine in the morning. Same egg, same child, same effort.

The lunchbox does the same thing.

Two boiled eggs and a yoghurt is a perfectly nice lunch with next to no fibre in it.

The same eggs in a wholemeal sandwich with a satsuma is a different day for that bowel.

I understand how it happens. Protein has become the thing we are all told to prioritise, and bread has quietly become the bit you leave off.

That is not doing the adults in the house any favours either, because most of us are short on fibre too.

To be clear about what I am and am not saying. Eating eggs does not automatically mean a child is short on fibre.

Plenty of children eat eggs and plenty of fibre alongside them.

But if egg-based meals are repeatedly taking the place of bread, fruit, vegetables or pulses, that pattern is worth looking at, and it is a great deal more useful than removing the egg.

How much fibre does my child actually need?

Most children in the UK are not getting close to the fibre they need. Only 14% of children aged 4 to 10 meet the recommendation, so if yours is falling short they are in the majority, not the exception.

Why constipation often carries on after you change the diet

This is the bit I most want you to take away, and it is the reason food swaps so often disappoint.

Constipation in children is rarely about one thing. Fibre matters. So does fluid.

But so does whether a poo hurt once and your child decided not to risk it again, whether stool has built up over weeks, and whether the treatment already in place is doing enough.

In clinic I usually find eggs sitting inside a much wider pattern: a narrow diet, limited fibre, stools that have become painful, and a child who has started holding on.

Which of those matters most genuinely varies from child to child, and you cannot tell from a food list.

Where diet fits alongside laxatives

One thing first, so you know whether this applies to your child.

I am writing about otherwise well children with constipation, which is most of the children I see.

A child with complex medical needs, restricted fluids or a compromised oral intake is a different conversation, and some of what follows will not apply to them.

NICE recommends laxative treatment alongside behavioural and dietary measures, with disimpaction treatment first when faecal impaction has been identified.

It also says dietary change should not be used on its own as first-line treatment. The latest joint ESPGHAN and NASPGHAN guidance similarly recommends a balanced diet with age-appropriate fibre and fluid.

That is how I work. Where laxatives have been prescribed, I do not wait until they are finished before looking at food.

If faecal impaction is present, dietary change will not clear it.

Laxatives are used to clear the impaction and then to maintain softer, painless stools while the bowel, and any withholding pattern, have time to recover.

This is why prescribed treatment matters, and why it should not be stopped too early.

So what is the diet actually doing?

That does not make diet the garnish.

In clinic, I often find that limited fibre, and sometimes inadequate fluid, is an important part of an individual child’s picture and has gone unaddressed while laxatives are being used.

So I work on food and drinks from the beginning, aiming for an age-appropriate intake from foods your child can realistically eat.

But diet is not the only thing that decides whether constipation continues or comes back.

Painful stools, withholding, toilet avoidance, changes in routine, and the duration or adequacy of treatment can all matter. Which of those carries the most weight varies from child to child.

The aim, ultimately, is to support a child to come off prescribed laxatives when it is clinically appropriate to do so.

Any change to prescribed laxatives should be agreed with the healthcare professional managing your child’s treatment, and never attempted on your own.

So if you have changed the diet and nothing has moved, it does not necessarily mean you chose the wrong food.

The intervention is not always the problem.

The order may be.

What to do instead

Practical, and in this order.

Do not remove eggs just because your child is constipated. If eggs are accepted and tolerated, they are usually worth keeping, and particularly so when a child already eats a short list of foods.

Eggs give you protein, B12, riboflavin, selenium and choline, they are soft and versatile, and crucially your child will actually eat them. Taking one item off an already short list is not a neutral act.

The goal in managing constipation in a selective eater is not to restrict further. It is to understand what the gut needs and build back from there.

Put the egg back on something. The easiest change in this article.

Scrambled egg becomes scrambled egg on toast.

Boiled eggs in the lunchbox become an egg sandwich.

Omelette gets a slice alongside.

Wholemeal adds the most fibre, but if that is a step too far for your child, a higher-fibre white loaf still adds more than no bread at all.

Start with what they will accept.

Stop campaigning for the eggs. Offer them by all means. But if your child has had eggs today, the next offer can be something else.

Beyond the egg

Add one fibre source at a time, alongside what your child already eats rather than instead of it.

Start with something they already accept.

Kiwi suits some children with constipation, though no single fruit will clear retained stool or replace laxative treatment where that is needed.

There is more detail in my guide to natural laxatives for children.

Check they are drinking enough as fibre goes up. Pushing fluids far beyond what your child normally needs is unlikely to fix established constipation on its own, but drinking too little makes everything harder to manage.

Sort the toilet routine. Encourage a relaxed five-minute toilet sit after one or two meals, with feet properly supported on a step so the knees sit above the hips.

No pressure to produce anything.

Watch for holding on. Crossed legs, tiptoes, hiding, going quiet, refusing to sit. If your child is withholding, food changes alone will not resolve it.

Keep a week of stool records. Type, frequency, pain, accidents. Dull, and one of the most useful things you can bring to an appointment.

Can Eggs Cause Diarrhoea?

In most children, no. Eggs are easily digested and do not contain compounds that would directly cause loose stools.

If your child develops diarrhoea after eating eggs, the more likely explanations are:

• Other ingredients in the meal that may not agree with them
• A gastrocolic reflex in a child with a sensitive gut, where eating anything stimulates bowel activity
• A genuine egg allergy, which can cause diarrhoea alongside other symptoms such as hives, vomiting, swelling or stomach cramps

Unlike constipation, diarrhoea caused by an egg allergy is usually not an isolated symptom.

There are often other signs that point towards allergy rather than a functional gut disorder.

If egg allergy has been ruled out and diarrhoea continues, the cause is almost certainly elsewhere.

This is exactly the kind of pattern that benefits from a structured assessment rather than removing foods one by one.

Frequently Asked Questions

REFERENCES

National Diet and Nutrition Survey 2019 to 2023 for UK children’s fibre intakes.

NICE CG99, Constipation in children and young people for assessment and treatment, including the position on dietary interventions.

Gordon et al., ESPGHAN and NASPGHAN guidelines for treatment of functional constipation in children aged 0 to 18 years, Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition.

Monash University on eggs and other low FODMAP proteins for the FODMAP content of eggs.