Photo by Photon_de (Creative Commons)

What on earth are you talking about?

Well, I don’t know if you remember, but a little while ago I posted about some of the strange and wonderful meals that I have been eating, courtesy of my live-in cook Anna (who just happens to be my other half). 

Beef heart stir fry: I am not sure I will ever fully recover from this meal.

Having seen her creations involving lambs’ liver and beef heart, you may have gathered that Anna is into culinary experimentation in a big way.  I thought I had got the measure of her but I didn’t quite realise quite how far she is willing to go in her quest for perfect nutritional solutions.

So what happened?  Did she serve you frogs legs or something?

Not quite.  Raw egg.  Apparently, raw foodists believe that by restricting your diet to raw foods you can improve your body composition by reducing fat and increasing muscle.  Anna carried out an experiment to see whether my bulking cycle could be improved by the addition of some raw egg.  She then posted about the experiment in this article about raw food. 

For the experiment, Anna started to mix two raw eggs into my daily shake at breakfast-time and continued to do this for four weeks.  In the interests of good science and a blind study, she didn’t tell me, which I can assure you did not go down at all well.

My monster shake: a good place to hide raw eggs, apparently

However, I didn’t die of salmonella, we are still living together and the results were as follows:

• At a time when I was finding it physically very hard to stuff any more food down my throat, she managed to add approximately 150 calories into my daily calorie intake without me noticing.  I was no fuller after breakfast than I had been before.
• However, while I continued to bulk during the month, there was no noticeable shift in my body composition to a leaner look.
• Towards the end of the study period I started to go off eggs in a big way.  This could have just been the fact that I reaching the limit of my ability to consume eggs (I had eaten a rude quantity of eggs over the preceding months) or it could have also been related to the raw egg.

So how does this help anyone?

Well, I haven’t given it much more thought but if you are looking to add muscle and the physical problem of consuming enough food is the limiting factor for you, then you might like to give raw foods some consideration.