Why does Japan eat so many Raw Eggs? ($70 vs $1 Egg)

Who eats the most eggs? At first, I thought  of America - Fresh scrambled eggs... pancakes,   eggs... Denny's, those two strips of bacon,  two eggs and two fluffy... but I was surprised   to learn that Japan eats way more eggs - at 320  eggs per person in 2017, that’s 70 more eggs than   Americans. By weight, Japan ate more eggs than  chicken, pork or beef. Japan was the number #1   egg consumer in the world for quite a while until  China took the lead in 2014. So why all the eggs? I’ve lived in Japan for 10 years now and there’s a  bunch of creative and delicious dishes with cooked   and raw egg here: A popular breakfast is tamago  kake gohan, just rice with a raw egg mixed in   with a little soy sauce. The popular rice bowl  fast food chains Yoshinoya, Sukiya and Matsuya   all have raw and soft boiled  egg available for order.   The dipping sauce for the mea dish sukiyaki  has raw egg, and of course you get boiled egg   in ramen and the popular winter soup oden…  and eggs show up in all kinds of bentos. After the war, thanks to the Leghorn chicken  with a high egg lay rate coming to Japan...   "the chicken of tomorrow." ... and the  government and media recommending protein   and calcium rich eggs to help with the damaged  health of the post-war Japanese population,   egg consumption boomed and the once rare  egg became a household staple by the 1960’s. So, while it it was advertised early  on to Japanese people that eggs will   rebuild their strength, Americans didn’t  hear too much about eggs other than that   cholesterol rich eggs are bad for your heart.  and While Japan held the #1 position for egg   consumption for 30 years from 1984, American egg  consumption has mostly declined since the 60’s. Eggs are a very low cost  source of protein, vitamin A,   iron, vitamin B12, riboflavin, choline, zinc and  calcium. Actually, Egg has some amount of every   single nutrient - vitamins and minerals, except  for vitamin C. These nutrients are good news for   Japan whose egg consumption continues to rise...  Anytime someone’s got a hankering for some egg,   they can walk into a convenience store and pick  up some tamagoyaki or ramen style boiled eggs. There is a huge variety of  chicken eggs here. I went   to three different supermarket  chains nearby and counted up 34   different types of eggs among them. Japan  has a lot of what are called “designer eggs.” The cool thing about chickens is  they are opportunistic omnivores,   so you can feed them all kinds of stuff. Actually,  chickens are known to eat plenty of bugs, and if   the opportunity arises they will eat small lizards  and mice. So designer eggs are when Certain foods   are deliberately given to chickens to enhance  the texture, taste or nutrients of the egg. For example the chickens of these eggs were fed   scraps of tuna to enhance the  brain enriching nutrient DHA. So you get various types of eggs where the chicken  was feed things like molasses, flax seed oil,   carrots and pumpkin… these were fed various types  of herbs including basil, rosemary and cinnamon.   So you get eggs with higher vitamin levels - these   have twice the vitamin B6 and 2.5 times  the vitamin E of normal eggs. "Egg." The most expensive eggs I could find  were 70 dollars for a pack of ten.   These are from chickens that were fed bits of  fish, seaweed, ground sesame, turmeric, red   peppers and 25 different types of Chinese herbs  and the chickens were treated very well of course. I wonder what they fed to  make the shell so strong,   it’s kind of hard to break it and there’s  a thick membrane you need to bust through.   Under a microscope The shell even has a much  different appearance from that of a normal egg. The egg white and yolk seem  a lot thicker and there’s a   much richer color with the expensive egg. These eggs are actually meant to be eaten raw,   so I asked my friend Jasmine to  come by and eat a bunch of raw eggs. "Mmm!   Whoah. It's sweet." "Really?"  "Yea, it's actually - yea it's actually  reallly sweet. I wouldn't think it's egg."  "Egg yolk... a deep orange..."  "Whoa, it doesn't really taste like egg... much.  It tastes like an egg but it's really rich,   and thick and woody almost? It's really  good. I think this is the better egg,   I'm already assuming." "Yolk... a normal egg color."   "Tastes like... a normal egg to me. Yup."  "but the other one was pretty  significantly different?"  "Yea, significantly different. The other one was  like potent. The other one tasted a lot richer.   It was more delicious, it was actually really  good. This just tastes like an egg to me." Because of excellent regulations  on egg production in Japan,   raw eggs are actually very safe. With a  salmonella infection rate of only .0029%,   a Japanese person can expect to get sick once  every ...two lifetimes. For the record, Japanese   people don't just eat raw eggs with spoons. This  is the simplest raw egg dish - tamago kake gohan. "Mmm... huhuhu it's good. Huhuhu." Actually before these arrived I tried  the yolk of these 5 different brands   of egg - - they were all quite mild and  some were slightly richer than others,   but the yolk of the expensive egg is actually  quite different from all of them. It's really   rich and has a sort of nutty flavor to it. It's  just better but it's hard to put your finger on. I tried the egg cooked sunny side  up and unfortunately you lose some   of the flavor by cooking it but it  was a lot better than a normal egg. I don’t have data on the egg’s nutritional  differences, but because the yolk is so   rich and has a deep redness to it we can expect  that there’s a lot of vitamin A in these eggs.   This is one of chickens’ super  powers. They take carotenoids,   the inferior plant derived vitamin  A precursor, and convert it for us   into the better absorbed more biologically  active form of vitamin A - retinol. "Are you just eating raw egg and rice?" "Hai."  "That's gross!" "Oishii yo." If you’re not used to eating eggs  raw - you might be grossed out,   but you’d be surprised how well  raw egg goes with some foods.   Before you eat raw eggs, look into the  safety of raw eggs in your country. There’s actually health benefits to not  heating the egg - particularly the egg yolk. A couple years back when I first got into  a low carbohydrate diet, I was on an egg   kick - I ate tons of eggs, often scrambled.  But, too many scrambled eggs would always   make my stomach a little queasy. At some point,  I picked up a pack of these lightly cooked onsen   tamago one day, had three of them in a huge salad  and my stomach felt fine. So the next day I ran a   little experiment - I straight up had 8 raw eggs  by themselves and my stomach was totally fine. What I think the issue was is cooking the egg  too much oxidizes the fats in the egg yolk. "Stop! Stop! He's already dead." Eggs, particularly those from cage free  pastured chickens, have the healthy omega-3   polyunsaturated fatty acids. But omega-3  and omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids   are very prone to oxidation and oxidized fats are  unhealthy. This is why you definitely don’t want   to cook with polyunsaturated vegetable oils like  canola, soybean, sunflower, peanut oil and others.   But anyways, my point is that if you can,  you don’t want to heat your egg yolk too   much because oxidized fats are bad news and  cause an inflammatory response in the body. This is not to say that raw eggs  are good and cooked eggs are bad,   cooked eggs will still have all the  benefits and nutrients discussed above.   Cooked eggs are good, but eggs with  the yolk not overcooked are better. Recently I ran a poll and it seems 46% of  you think eggs are healthy enough that ten a   day is no problem and while 19% of you weren’t  sure but owned a tamagotchi in middle school,   35% of you at least thought that 10 eggs was  too much and the rest of you still need to   hit the subscribe and bell button. Sure, 10  eggs is a lot of food, about 800 calories,   but if they're good quality pastured  eggs, what’s wrong with a bunch of eggs? The 2015 US Dietary Guidelines said you don’t  have to worry about eating too much cholesterol.   85% of the cholesterol in your blood comes from  the body making it. So, if you eat too much,   your body will just make less cholesterol. This is why most people can eat ridiculous   amounts of cholesterol and have normal blood  cholesterol, like these 8 burn patients who   ate 35 eggs a day for a month. Or this 88  year old who ate 25 eggs a day for 15 years. Actually, evidence is showing we  don’t need to worry about cholesterol,   and triglycerides are more important  but that’s a story for another time. Today we still have headlines saying things like  eggs will increase your risk of heart disease,   diabetes and death. But the studies these are  based on have terrible designs, for example this   very professional looking 2019 study saying eggs  increase heart disease and death got their data   by giving people a multiple choice questionnaire  asking them to remember about how many eggs they   ate in all of last year - who accurately keeps  track of their egg intake for a whole year? The data in the “eggs give you diabetes” study is  totally muddled because the people eating the most   eggs happened to smoke the most, eat the most  calories, exercise the least and drink the most   alcohol. The type of people to eat a bunch of eggs  despite dietary guidelines saying eggs are bad   are probably the type of people who  ignore health advice in general. I’m not a dietician, I’m not a doctor, and I’m  not recommending everyone eat 10 eggs a day   But personally I think these anti-egg claims  need to stop "But then I found a study suggesting   that eating just one egg a day can be as bad as  smoking 5 cigarettes per day for life expectancy."   Eggs are a cheap source of protein and valuable  nutrients. Harvard says one egg a day is fine,   Healthline says 3 a day is fine but  why? but What’s wrong even with 5 or 6? 42% of Americans are vitamin D deficient.  Along with all these other nutrients,   10 normal eggs would give you 100% of  your vitamin D requirement... Just sayin’. And with that I’d like to introduce  the channel’s first piece of merch   celebrating the awesome power  and beneficial status effects   of eggs. If you’d like to support the channel,  check the description for your very own egg. So I was playing with this AI software that  let’s you change one frame from a video   and then it will apply that  change to the rest of the video.   It seems to be that it recognizes certain shapes  within the image, but I’m not sure why the face   I put on this egg got all warbled, but if  you want to know how things like this work,

Channel: What I've Learned

Views: 395,070

Rating: 4.9422469 out of 5

Keywords: Are eggs healthy, are eggs unhealthy, japan, japanese people, japanese food, japanese diet, why are japanese people, why does japan, eggs in japan, food in japan, raw eggs, are eggs bad for you, are eggs good for you, healthiest diet, healthy diet, what do people eat in Japan, tamago kake gohan, omurice, worth it, tamago, how many eggs, how many eggs per day, japanese language, how do you say egg in japanese, jasmine, taste test

Id: cjrxXC3kGf4

Length: 12min 49sec (769 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/haladura]

This video does mention flax seed eggs briefly, so maybe somehow it's related to the topic of this sub. Also they mention not using seed oils, at one point.

[u/boredbitch2020]

I can't wait to have chickens again and feed them seaweed and fish guts, and orange veggies so they can convert it for me

[u/NoEyesNoGroin]

Good video, generally very good information. There's only 1 thing I would say which is, at the end it says not to worry about cholesterol, but this is only true if you follow the advice from the rest of the video (don't overcook egg yolk), and for the same reason - cooking cholesterol oxidises it the same way it does the PUFA oils, and it's this form of cholesterol which is bad for you. So have your eggs raw or lightly poached.

[u/jaypeeo]

This channel is so good. Highly recommended