Putting eggs in a health shake—use the egg shells, too?

Cafe Society
1

That’s about it. If you are going to add an egg or two to a healthy shake, should/can you throw the egg in, shell and all? Pros? Cons?

Thanks.

2

It’s a lot easier to blend a soft, malleable egg than a hard, breaks-into-pointy-shards eggshell. Which would you rather drink?

3

Are you joking? pointy shards of stuff that rubbed all its way out of a chicken’s arse? I’ll have a Tums.

4

Technically, when the egg is expelled from the vagina at the end of the reproductive tract, the terminal end of the intestine is squeezed shut, reducing possible contamination with fecal material. Since both vagina and intestine empty into the cloaca, there is a chance for fecal contamination of the egg in the cloaca, but this area is at least grossly clean in health. So, fecal contamination from a healthy bird is, at best, microscopic and unlikely to be an issue for a healthy adult human.

Additionally, nearly all modern commercial egg producers wash their eggs before they go to market, reducing fecal contamination further.

As for the OP, I have not heard of any nutritional reason why you can’t eat egg shell. The albumen, or egg white, does contain some antimicrobial elements that could give you a Vitamin B7 (biotin) deficiency. However, my understanding is that you would have to be eating quite a lot of raw egg white for a while before you would see a clinical effect.

Taste wise, I don’t know how you’d blend your drink fine enough not to have little crunchy bits. But maybe those won’t bother you. I could always find the one stray piece of egg shell in the cookie batch.

Have fun.

5

While the denizens of General Questions are almost certainly the healthiest of posters to this Board, I think this one can be moved to Cafe Society.

samclem GQ moderator

6

Somebody did a study on using powdered eggshell as a calcium substitute in humans. Conclusion: “As the piglet model is considered to be representative for humans, chicken eggshell powder is also a promising source of calcium for human nutrition.”

OTOH, "…Then the egg is coated with a tasteless, natural mineral oil to protect it. "

For me, although I can tell myself, “Hey, the FDA sez this puppy’s been washed and sanitized,”, it’s the mineral oil that puts the “yuk” factor too high. And you can get calcium from other places, so…why bother?

7

Why not use oyster shells? That’s where commercial chickens get their calcium. (Yeah, I go to an agricultural college)