Yes!
You can indeed eat raw whites, but the whole eggs or carton eggs must be
pasteurized (it will say so on the tub). Pasteurization is when they heat egg
product enough to kill all the bacteria (including salmonella) and the protein
digestion inhibitors (usually126-140 degrees).
If you eat non-pasteurized egg products your body cannot use the protein in them due to the presence of a protein inhibitor called tripsin, and another avidin a glycoprotein, which blocks the uptake of some vitamins.
Avidin is a glycoprotein, which is found in raw egg whites, and blocks the uptake of Vitamin B6 and Vitamin H (Biotin) causing a vitamin deficiency (it binds to Biotin and iron making them unavailable). You must cook/pasteurize the egg white to neutralize the Avidin and allow your body to safely digest the protein and utilize all its amino acids.
It is also possible to get salmonella from raw eggs/egg product the chances are 1 in 10,000 for regular eggs and 1 in 30,000 for free range eggs. Low, but still not worth it, perhaps?
Cooking egg whites at high temperatures denatures some of the amino acids which makes the proteins slightly more slower digesting. A soft boiled or poached egg (at 70% albumin coagulation) is digested much easier to digest as opposed to a fried or hard boiled egg.
2 soft boiled eggs spend less than 2 hours in the stomach being digested, where 2 fried or hard boiled eggs spend over 3 hours in the stomach.
Although fried/hard cooked eggs are digested just as completely as soft cooked eggs, it just takes longer for them to be completely digested and assimilated.
You may ask why it takes longer for digestion, and the answer is fairly straight forward.
An egg white is about 10% protein and 90% water. It’s the proteins that cause the egg white to solidify when you cook it. Egg white proteins are long chains of amino acids. In a raw egg, these proteins are curled and folded to form a compact ball.
Weak bonds between amino acids hold the proteins in this shape—until you turn up the heat. When heated, the weak bonds break and the protein unfolds. Then its amino acids form weak bonds with the amino acids of other proteins, a process called coagulation. The resulting network of proteins captures water, making a soft, digestible gel.
If you keep the heat turned up too high or too long when you cook an egg, the proteins in the egg white form more and more bonds, squeezing some of the water out of the protein network and making the egg white rubbery and increasing their digestion time.
So, basically the easiest to digest and indeed most bioavailable egg proteins are either pasteurized raw eggs/egg products or soft cooked/poached eggs that have not reached 160 degrees at which point the proteins become coagulated and take longer to be completely digested and assimilated.
I hope this helps clear up questions!
