A baseball athlete has opened up about the extreme number of eggs he used to consume each day while trying to boost strength and speed up recovery.
Elite athletes often follow routines that look unusual to most people, but those choices can be part of what helps them compete at a high level.
For New York Mets prospect Ryan Lambert, one especially eyebrow-raising approach ended up becoming part of his training story.
The 23-year-old previously said he was drinking 30 raw eggs a day as he chased added muscle and better recovery.
Speaking to MLB.com’s Anthony DiComo, he said: “Day 1, it was an adjustment for sure.
“But I’m not a chicken. I like a little adversity and challenge. It kind of gets me going.”
DiComo reported that Lambert’s interest in the egg-heavy diet started after he came across a social media video about it around two years ago.
Although he no longer keeps up the full 30-a-day routine, Lambert has said he noticed positives after trying it. One of the biggest talking points around his development has been his eye-catching pitching velocity, which has topped 100mph.
And while Lambert believes the egg intake played a role in his progress, he’s far from the only person to test what happens when eggs dominate the menu.
YouTuber Dr Nick Norwitz took on his own version of the challenge, eating 24 eggs daily for an entire month.
The content creator explained that eating 720 eggs in a month ‘amounts to 133,200 MG of cholesterol’ however, he hypothesized that eating so many eggs wouldn’t actually ‘increase [his[ cholesterol’ and ‘specifically it would not increase [his] LDL cholesterol’.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains LDL cholesterol is ‘sometimes called “bad” cholesterol’.
In his video, he added: “It makes up most of your body’s cholesterol. High levels of LDL cholesterol raise your risk for heart disease and stroke.”
When the month-long experiment wrapped up, Dr Norwitz said his cholesterol levels didn’t rise, despite the huge number of eggs.
He explained: “Even though my dietary intake of cholesterol more than twintupled, my LDL cholesterol actually dropped by two percent over the first two weeks.”
He also said the change continued, with LDL falling a further 18 percent over the next two weeks.
Explaining why this happened, the doctor said: “Basically, when you eat cholesterol it ‘binds to receptors on gut cells and this stimulates the release of a hormone called chisin and chisin binds to its receptor on the liver called GPR1 146 and this inhibits endogenous cholesterol synthesis by the liver so things balance out and the homeostasis is maintained.”