Raw eggs - Yeah or Nay?

[Jimbo]

Sorry if this has already been covered...I haven't seen any specific posts on it though.

I was hungry last night b4 bed and didn't want to touch any carbs...so I made a shake using a couple of eggs, some vanilla flavoring and splenda on ice..blended it. Pretty tasty too.

Oh yeah...I did add a little bitty bit of milk. 2%

It was mostly water and eggs though. Just enough to kill my craving. I don't hear too many folks saying they ever touch raw eggs though..is that a big No-No?

[jax]

there's some risk.

next time scramble those suckers.

[Jimbo]

What kind of risk?

Ithere anything protien wise that is beneficial about cooking as opposed to raw?

[Jimbo]

I love dropping them raw in a shake. Easy and convenient.

[jax]

the risk would be salmonella. it's pretty rare, but it's a risk.

i've heard if anything, cooking the egg is bad for the protein... so that wouldn't be a problem.

from time to time i eat things with raw egg; just be aware that there is a possible risk of salmonella.

[Johnka]

You'll find a lot of mixed recommendations about raw vs. cooked eggs. Mercola swears by raw eggs and says that the salmonella risk is minimal.

But he also claims that cooking eggs "completely deactivates nearly every other protein in the egg white". I'm not sure how true this is, but a study in the Journal of Nutrition found that cooked egg protein is more digestible than raw eggs. For cooked eggs, 90% of the protein was digested, while only 51% of the protein in raw eggs was digested. That's almost 50% more protein digested in cooked eggs vs. raw, using the exact same amount for each (100 g). This certainly contradicts Mercola's claim.

The study concluded that the higher digestibility of cooked egg protein presumably results from structural changes in the protein molecule induced by heating, thereby enabling the digestive enzymes to gain broader access to the peptide bonds.

So in the end, I cook my eggs. Less chance of salmonella, and more bang for the buck.

[galya]

My earliest information on that is from a Russian biochemistry book for second year medicine students and I remember it had similar facts to those Johnka quoted about % of digested protein from raw or cooked eggs. It said however that cooked egg protein is best digestible if it has been cooked between 5 and 10 minutes and certainly with more cooking time digestibility falls down again. It said raw whites were almost indigestible, which that other study said, they are.
When we are little we are taught here that one sure way of preventing salmonela from getting into your breakfast is simply washing your eggs (no kidding, when I was a kid it wasn't rare here at all). Of course cooking them won't hurt either.

[Lost Dog]

A little blurb from here http://www.mercola.com/2002/nov/13/eggs.htm

"When you carefully analyze the risk of contracting salmonella from raw eggs, you will find that it is actually quite low. A study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture earlier this year (Risk Analysis April 2002 22(2):203-18) showed that of the 69 billion eggs produced annually, only 2.3 million of them are contaminated with salmonella.

So simple math suggests that only 0.00003 percent of eggs are infected. The translation is that only one in every 30,000 eggs is contaminated with salmonella. This gives you an idea of how uncommon this problem actually is."

1 in 30,000 ain't so bad.