Eggs

Eggs come immediately after meat at the top of the scale of nutritional value. During his tenure at the University of Florence, the celebrated physiologist Moritz Schiff²⁷ used to argue that the egg white is more nourishing than the yolk, which is composed of fatty substances, and that raw or lightly cooked eggs are less readily digested than well cooked eggs, because the stomach has to perform two operations instead of one: first coagulating the egg, then breaking it down to prepare it for assimilation by the body. Therefore it is better to abide by the middle path: eggs should be cooked neither too little nor too much.