I was told some time ago that egg whites you buy in carton are pasteurized, which means cooked. And not cooking, say frying, reduces the chance of denaturing them which make “raw” an equal or better choice.
This was from a well known online coach,
I use to drink egg whites from the container out of convenience at work with the added bonus of grossing co workers out
@Twoskinny - As with almost anything this subject is stupidly complicated if you dig in deep enough so I understand we are speaking somewhat loosely here. My reply here now is just to clarify a few points that I think deserve a little more digging into.
To call something pasteurized "cooked" is technically correct as yes, it is prepared by heating. This is really pushing the boundaries of how the term cooked is commonly used though, at best most people might say barely or half cooked. I hope y'all are catching what I mean here, if you said "Eggs for breakfast!" and presented a bowl of pasteurized egg whites and a spoon your average 5 year old would probably have a tearful meltdown and any guests you were serving would probably be like "wtf aren't you gonna cook this slime?"
This leads to discussion of denaturing proteins. Seems to be very commonly misunderstood, quite probably by myself as well but I tell ya what I think anyways
My very abbreviated take - most everything I've seen in the literature referencing protein denaturing being a negative thing is referring to protein in a live state, it's bad because it leads to cell death or malfunction. This obviously means that you don't want the protein in your muscles to denature.
This is where the confusion comes in IMO, concern for cellular damage of what we eat is rather badly misplaced as denaturing is a normal and desirable part of the digestion process.
In this arena it's not just desirable, hey it's already partially digested, it is absolutely necessary. The more the better, it's tied into the level of bio availability - no denaturing = no digestion = no amino acids available to your body. This is where my question of how bio available these egg whites are comes from.
Why is it not more commonly discussed in this vein? Probably because it's very hard to measure what happens to it once it enters the body. The study that
@biguglynewf posted explains this very well if interested.
BTW thanks for that post BUN, I don't think I've ever seen it before and it's very informative. The problem my nitpicking brain has with it is that it does not address my question directly although there is enough info in their to reach some reasonable conclusions. They compare raw vs cooked but pasteurized is some where in the middle.
It does say "In conclusion, with the use of stable isotope techniques, we were able to determine
the amounts of egg protein escaping digestion and absorption in the small intestine after ingestion of a physiologic load.
Native egg protein is malabsorbed to an important extent. The assimilation of egg protein is facilitated by heat-pretreatment, but remains incomplete."
So all of that rambling leads me to believe that the bio availability of pasteurized egg whites would be less than when properly cooked but more than when raw, the opposite of what
@Twoskinny 's coach said.
The reason I want to know so bad is so I can make a decision about how to consume them, I usually consume a cup a day cooked but if the level of usable protein available by drinking it is high enough I'm not opposed to that at all, budget is a concern, is it cost and time effective enough when all things are considered?
I tag posts with this fairly often but PLEASE correct or educate me where possible, I'm not trying to prove I'm right, I only seek to be correctly informed.
