On 2024’s Valentine’s day, John revealed a red heart-shaped box to his 413k followers and opened it to reveal tiny chicken breasts, saying that, “I would be devouring the hearts of these lovely little birds and absorbing their love.” It might sound sadistic, but John is a man on a scientific mission. Day after day, he unpacks hunks of raw chicken, vigorously chews into it and guzzles up yellowish raw eggs from crystalline wine glasses, recording all of this in the form of short videos that he shares on his Instagram page.
On Day 1 of participating in this challenge, he announced that he would eat raw chicken every day until he gets a tummy ache. His videos have received millions of views and are still counting as he continues the challenge on social media. The Florida-based man is basically on a mission to prove that eating raw meat is not as damaging to one’s health as it is believed to me. Two years earlier, while he had not started documenting his “raw chicken experiment,” he used to post a series on YouTube with videos titled as, “Eating raw meat at Whole Foods every day till I die from bacteria.” Eventually, he got bored after 200 days, but he didn’t die or get sick. So, this year, he decided to get going one more time to prove his hypothesis. He is currently on Day 31 of his raw chicken experiment. But he predicts that it is, “A 75 percent chance that I’ll be fine for 100 days.”
John spoke to Vice in an interview and said that he was actually a vegan before but it didn’t suit his overall health, “I used to be a vegan and was very much of the mindset that animal food products are bad and pointless. I was trying to eat as many fruits and vegetables, kombucha and superfood powders as I could to be healthy, but I just felt it wasn’t working properly. I had cystic acne, back pain, dizziness, low energy, and some days I couldn’t even get out of bed. I tried everything and added sea moss to all of my smoothies but nothing worked to make me feel better. I got really into researching weird diets from around the world. I got into many YouTube rabbit holes about how eating meat is actually really healthy and became obsessed.” He further said that the problem is not in eating raw chicken but in the way the animal meat received the treatment in the original factory farm. “In Japan, they’ll have raw chicken on menus. I don’t think it’s the raw chicken itself that will kill you; it’s more what they’re doing to the animals in the factory farms,” he explained. However he agrees that it is close to impossible to make everybody believe that it is a good idea. Talking about the reactions on this from his loved ones, he says that they are now getting used to his weird experiments, “My girlfriend’s parents will joke around saying, ‘You can come round for dinner but it will be cooked.’”
According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the United States, people consume chicken more than beef, pork, or turkey. When cooked, chicken can be a nutritious choice, but raw chicken can be contaminated with Campylobacter, Salmonella, or Clostridium perfringens germs. If one eats undercooked chicken, one can get a foodborne illness, also called food poisoning. One can also get sick at eating other foods or beverages that are contaminated by raw chicken or its juices. CDC estimates that every year in the United States about 1 million people get sick from eating contaminated poultry. John is almost nearing a month of eating raw chicken on a daily basis. His audience is spectacularly growing. Now only time will tell whether John’s extraordinary challenge leads to some praise-worthy conclusions or not.
