I’m sure you’ve seen movies or cartoons where a character cracks open a bunch of eggs into a pitcher and drinks them to bulk up. How did eating raw eggs even become a thing? I know eggs are high in protein, but how does eating them raw supposedly make you bulk up better/faster than eating them cooked?
I assume because it’s a lot easier to drink down raw eggs than to cook them?
I’m not sure how it benefits one to eat raw rather than cooked, bulking-up wise, but I would surmise that whatever benefits can be had are way outweighed by the health risk of salmonella, etc.
I would think you would lose your gains from being sick with salmonella, too.
https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/128/10/1716/4723080
The true ileal digestibility of cooked and raw egg protein amounted to 90.9 ± 0.8 and 51.3 ± 9.8%, respectively.
It’s an old-school protein shake.
Right, nowadays, protein powder is widely available but may not have been in decades past.
Handling eggs safely to prevent Salmonella.
The Centers for Disease Control estimates that 1 in every 20,000 eggs are contaminated with Salmonella
So if that risk is independent (probably not, but it makes for a good initial estimate) and you ate ten raw eggs every day, at the end of year you’d have about a 17% chance of catching salmonella.
1-(1- 1/20000)^3652.5
I think you might gain more than you lost, on average.
(The risks will be different in different countries, because salmonella is treated very different by various food safety groups. I wasn’t able to find good data per-egg outside if the US, though.)
Salmonella is just weakness being rejected by the body!
Not the best way to get protein from eggs.
One study, published in The Journal of Nutrition, found that the availability of egg protein is 91% with cooked eggs and only 50% with raw eggs. That means a raw egg would only provide 3 grams of digestible protein
https://www.eggnutritioncenter.org/articles/nutritional-benefits-cooked-vs-raw-eggs
Eggs used to be considered sterile unless the shell had been cracked.
That doesn’t work if the chickens’ oviducts are infected; which either used to be very uncommon, or at least used to be thought to be very uncommon.
The first time I ever heard about drinking raw eggs was seeing Rocky Balboa do it in the first Rocky film.
Drinking eggs was the kind of gym wisdom that an old timer like his trainer, Mickey, would have picked up in the 1940s and imparted to young guys like Rocky. Nothing really based on studies or firm science.
I was going to ask for a TL;DR version in my caffeine-deficient state. Then I saw this:
So it’s better to eat them cooked.
You can also buy pasteurized eggs if you have any concern. But, as mentions, the bioavailability of protein is less than cooked eggs. On the other hand, it’s quicker and more convenient. On the other other hand, as mentioned, we have protein powders for this now. (I eat raw eggs without a second thought, but only have them several times a year, usually on steak tartare.)
It was just part of the process to toughen up the fighter. That toughness is sometimes called ‘intestinal fortitude’, the result of drinking a dozen raw eggs for breakfast explains how that term arose.
Rocky was released in 1976. The Rocky Horror Picture Show released in 1975 mentions “swallow raw eggs” as a bodybuilding activity, so presumably it was a common trope.
Every year, between Christmas and New Years we make several batches of real egg nog. It’s a very old family recipe, and it’s so popular I’ve begun to think we get invited to parties just because people want us to bring the nog (seriously, we probably end up making 5-6 batches every year). The alcohol is about 12% by volume. Two decades on and nobody has ever got sick
(And yes, I know it’s an anecdote; I also think people worry way too much)
I would have assumed that much alcohol is enough to kill salmonella.
Hmm, it’s harder than i expected to find how long salmonella survives in what concentration of alcohol, but this study
Suggests that while other pathogens survive in beer and rice wine, salmonella maybe doesn’t.
Hmm, this article says it take 3 weeks in the fridge for salmonella die in eggnig that’s 20% alcohol. Salmonella contamination isn’t very common. Maybe you’ve just been lucky.
But i agree about generally not worrying about eating raw eggs. I routinely eat runny eggs, and I’m pretty sure they haven’t been heated enough to be sterilized.
Documentary evidence of something:
Then skip to 1:10 for the results.