Chick Diary: H-14 Candling success

To my inexperienced eye, it’s taken me a whole week so come up with a confirmed fertile egg sighting. Well it could just be my inexperienced eye, or it could just be my makeshift candling methods or it could just be sheer impatience. But when you see your little chick bobbing up and down inside the egg – well! What a proud moment!
The method I Use for candling is as follows:

1. Get a dark room. (Haha, I’m so funny I crack myself up – crack up? Eggs? Oh, well if you don’t get it forget it)

2. Use a bright torch – I have an LED based head torch, which seems to work well. Just use as bright a torch as you can get hold of, it will make identifying good and bad eggs easier.

3. Pinch your thumb and ring finger together to form a divers ‘ok’ sign (difficult to explain so I have included a picture).

4. Remove your egg from the incubator and sit it on top of the ‘ring’ you made with your thumb and ring finger. Don’t worry about the eggs being out of the incubator – its harmless to your little chick and the eggs can be out of the incubator for up to half an hour without a problem.

5. Place your torch underneath the ‘ring’ and the egg so the only light coming through to your eyes will have to be through the egg.

6. If the egg has a live chick inside then you should see a small, dark dot inside the egg with like a spiders legs vein pattern coming from the dot. If you’re lucky and the chick has grown a little more you may see it wriggling and wobbling inside the egg.

At the moment I don’t have any pictures to show you of what a live egg should look like – but I will try to set my good camera up tonight to see if I can get some, failing that I will pull some photos off the internet.

Eggs: Good for you or bad for you?

I’ve been keeping chickens for a little while now – which means I get a LOT of eggs. Trouble is, what to do with all the eggs once your chickens do start laying for you. The average chicken bred for laying will lay in the region of 250 eggs a year. And an average family might go through 500 – 600 a year. So two hens might well cater for a families egg needs. But what if you say live on your own, and have more than two dozen hens, and there is a credit crunch on and you find yourself eating 7 egg omelettes on most days. Is this really bad for you?
Well the above description describes me quite accurately. First thing you may expect is a significant weight gain, yet in my case (probably because I’m no longer sat behind a desk all day) I have experienced significant weight loss – from around 19 stone at my heaviest to around 16 stone now.
We are often told that too many eggs a day is bad for you and I would agree that a balanced diet is a noble aim. But what is a balanced diet? I think there may be a significant difference between a balanced diet and a ‘normal’ diet. Balanced = good for you, normal = what most people eat. I looked online and one UK study told me that you should eat no more than two a week as there is a large amount of cholesterol in eggs. Now for someone who is eating 40 – 50 a week that sounded like bad news. I panicked, then I re-read the study, and more significantly who commissioned the study – turns out its Kellogg’s. Hmmm... I wonder why Kellogg’s – a breakfast cereal maker, may have an interest in restricting egg – a great and traditional breakfast meal, consumption?
Deeper digging came up with this study:
NUTRITION RESEARCHERS at Kansas State University have published the first evidence that the absorption of cholesterol is reduced by another compound in the egg, a lecithin.

The research was done by Sung I. Koo, Yonghzhi Jiang and Sang K. Noh. A peer-reviewed research paper by the three researchers, "Egg phosphatidylcholine decreases the lymphatic absorption of cholesterol in rats," appears in the Journal of Nutrition.

Many people believe that dietary cholesterol directly raises blood cholesterol. Because eggs provide about half the dietary cholesterol in a typical western diet, the public has been advised to limit its egg consumption.

Under experimental conditions using an animal model that closely mimics human physiology, Koo and his associates found that a particular egg phospholipid interferes with the absorption of egg cholesterol and markedly lowers its uptake by the intestine. When the phospholipid is saturated, its inhibitory effect is further enhanced.

The researchers controlled experimental conditions to specifically look at egg phospholipid and its effect on cholesterol absorption.

Even though a good amount of cholesterol is consumed when an egg is eaten, much of it becomes "unavailable for absorption" in the presence of the phospholipid, Koo said.

"This may be a reason why many studies found no association between egg intake and cholesterol," he said. The phospholipid, or lecithin, found in egg inhibits cholesterol absorption. The inhibition is not 100 percent, he said. Some cholesterol is absorbed but amount is reduced in the presence of this phospholipid.

"Less absorption means less cholesterol introduced into the blood," Koo said. "We were able to determine experimentally that a substantial amount of the egg cholesterol is not going into the blood stream."

The compounds are naturally occurring or derived from their natural precursors which could lead directly to development of new compounds for lowering cholesterol. Koo anticipates that regulatory barriers to such development will be low.

Koo says people with normal cholesterol and no family history of cardiovascular disease should not worry about eating 1-2 eggs a day. There's overall nutritional benefit than harm gained from eating "nutrient-dense" eggs _ in moderation, he said. Egg contains a high quality protein than protein found in meat, milk or fish.

Furthermore, egg is a significant source of vitamins A and E, and B vitamins, B-6, B-12 and folate, which are known to lower blood levels of homocyst(e)ine, an independent risk factor for heart disease.

So according to the Kansas state university; there may be bad stuff in eggs but there is also some really good stuff and what’s more there is some good stuff that limits the amount of bad stuff your body can take in. So, I am going to continue with my 40 a week regime as so far all the effects on my body appear positive (weight loss, increased muscle mass and a satisfied all day ‘full’ full feeling. And I don’t see why anyone should feel guilty about increasing their weekly egg intake – especially if it is from a good source of eggs from healthy chickens.

That said I don’t fancy following in the footsteps of ‘Cool Hand Luke’ See the hilarious clip below to find out what happens when someone tries to eat 50v eggs in an hour...

Chick Diary: Hatch(H)-21

I never thought I would be thinking about family planning again. I have two small children and I thought that would be it for me. But standing in front of a strange contraption that resembles a cross between a lamp fitting and a bucket I found myself thinking – I might actually be a dad again.

Not a dad in the traditional sense you understand, but the responsibilities are remarkably similar. Here I was with my egg incubator and a slack handful of bantam eggs ready to be incubated. I had done a bit of studying for this and my new role as dad meant that I still had to look after an maintain the egg incubator (mum) throughout pregnancy, still had to make sure the chicks were fed, watered and given shelter and still had to make sure they went to bed on time. Yes the similarities were striking. So it was not without trepidation that I placed the eggs in the incubator.

So here we are cracking on and expanding my little chicken family. Bantams should take around 19 days to hatch and I’ll be letting you know how my journey goes, from egg to ‘point of lay’, I’ll be reporting on the ups and downs of my new foray into fatherhood.