What has more nutritional value a fresh Egg or a newly hatched Chick and what are the changes of the composition in the different proteins and fats etc.?
Somebody here has gotta know:
Nutritional value of an egg. A large egg has roughly 70 calories.
One day old chicks, according tothis chart have 5.8 calories per gram. A newly hatched chick can weigh from 15 to 30 grams.
Based on this information, there is more energy available in a chick than in an egg, but in the case of a small chick, just barely. The only nutritional value I could find for chicks was as food for snakes, however. Snakes are going to eat the whole thing and digest as much as possible. Humans would clean the chick of inedible pieces and organs, remove the head and feet, and not eat the bones.
I’ll leave you to decide which has more nutritional value based on your application. In my opinion, eggs would be the superior choice for humans, as the calories expended preparing the chick would probably give you a net loss. 
It seems counter-intuitive to me that there would be more energy in the chick than in the egg. Where is the difference coming from?
A new chick, before it has fed, has to have less nutritional value than the egg it emerged from. For one thing, there is some nutritional value in the egg shell and the attached membranes. Also, the chick will have expended some energy (and thus food stores) in breaking out of the egg.
I would think the egg would be much more nutritious. After all, the chick has feathers, bones, and a beak, none of which is digestible. The egg, OTOH, is almost 100% digestible.
The question came up while we were discussing the Philippine custom of eating Duck Eggs that have about 15 Days old Chicks in them called “Balut”, I am sure American Service Men stationed in the Philippines are familiar with it, the believe is that they are some kind of “Viagra” and so must have some more “Value” than fresh Eggs…
That kind of myth is told about all kinds of eggs, such as turtle eggs and quail eggs (regular ones, not partly developed ones), in Spanish speaking countries (and the Philippines were formerly a Spanish colony). It may simply be due to the similarity of shape between eggs and testicles, both of which are called huevos.
My knee-jerk reaction to the question was “Of course the egg has more nutrition!” I didn’t have any cites to back that up, so I went looking. Finding egg nutrition was easy. Finding chick nutrition was more difficult. I only reported the information from the sites I found, but as I stated in my post, I still feel like the egg has more nutrition…at the very least, it has more *available *nutrition. I can’t comment on the fat or nutrient differences because I can’t find nutrient information for baby chicks that is reported in a similar format to USDA food labeling, so making any comparison other than calories is difficult.
You can’t really make a valid comparison unless you are comparing eggs of the exact same size. Taking the data from different tables that give averages won’t allow you to make an accurate comparison.
Just on thermodynamic principles, it’s impossible for a newly hatched chick to have more nutrition than the egg it hatched from. Energy will have been used up in metabolism and growth during the time it was in the egg. And some of the material in the egg will have been converted to less digestible forms such as feathers and scales.
That’s what I was thinking but I thought that maybe something was escaping me (energy coming from outside air permeating through the shell, heat somehow converted into chick, inside of the shell turned into beak or bone, things like that)
. . . and chicken shit!
Didja ever open a partially-developed chicken egg? We did that in 10th grade biology class. Started a bunch of eggs growing, and opened one or two every few days for a look-see.
They are fucking gross! As the chick fetus grows and metabolizes, of course it is using up calories, and I suppose some heat energy must be leaking away. And in addition to feathers and bones, it also produces waste products that just accumulate in the egg. With every additional day of in-egg growth, the accumulated chickenshit in the egg just gets grosser and grosser.
[sub]ETA: Come to think of it, does a developing chicken, or any bird, develop feathers in the egg? I thought birds hatched bald and grew feathers later. I once hand-fed some newly hatched macaws, and that’s what they do.[/sub]
Chickens and other precocial birdsalready have feathers when they hatch out of the egg.Altricial birds, like parrots and most songbirds, hatch naked and grow feathers later.
Reminds me of the punchline to an offensive joke:
“Why the difference?”
“Have you ever tried to clean one?”