Forget all about the fact that Beauty and the Beast involves a hairy monster-man whose dedicated asshole-ness gets his servants turned into candlesticks and household objects who perform delightful musical routines. Realistic enough, don’t have to think twice about it.
But the one part of the 1991 Disney animated film that I can’t wrap my noggin around? The song where Gaston claims to consume five dozen eggs (60!!!) a day.
Sir??? I don’t think so.
In his self-titled song, Gaston famously sings:
When I was a lad, I ate four dozen eggs
Every morning to help me get large,
And now that I’m grown, I eat five dozen eggs,
So I’m roughly the size of a barge.
Let me break that down. For starters, a nutritionist recently explained to MEL that a healthy serving of eggs per day is one single egg. That means Gaston consumes 59 more eggs per day than he should. That’s problematic in itself, but the issue goes deeper than that.
An egg has an average of 72 calories. Sixty eggs would therefore equal 4,320 calories total. I realize Gaston is a large man — as he says, roughly the size of a barge — but this is still more calories than he requires. Moreover, were he to consume this many calories from eggs per day, there’s no way he’d be able to eat anything else.
“Eggs are certainly a perfectly nutritious food, packed with protein, fat-soluble vitamins, choline and even some omega-3 fats,” says registered dietician Rachael Hartley. “And for all the fear-mongering you used to hear about eggs and cholesterol, dietary cholesterol doesn’t seem to have a major impact on lipid levels and the risk of heart disease, except for a small number of people who are hyper-responsive to dietary cholesterol.”
But although eggs contain a ton of the nutrients a person needs in a day, they don’t contain all of them. “Too much of anything isn’t helpful for health,” explains Hartley. “If you were eating that many eggs, you wouldn’t have much room for other nutritious foods. Nutrition and health isn’t about foods being ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy,’ it’s about getting enough food, and a variety of different foods, which is hard to do when your stomach is full of five dozen eggs.”
In addition to missing out on vitamin C and several minerals found in fruits and vegetables, were Gaston to exclusively eat eggs, carbohydrates would be missing from his diet entirely. Without any carbs, Gaston’s body would have to break down muscle tissue for energy. He’d never, in short, be able to maintain his barge-like body.
Most disturbingly, Gaston claims he eats these five dozen eggs “every morning,” i.e., for breakfast. Were he actually to do this in one sitting, his stomach would likely burst. The average stomach can hold about 32 ounces, maximum. Let’s assume Gaston drinks his eggs raw, as that would be the easiest way to consume that many eggs in one sitting. An egg contains around 1.5 to 2 ounces of liquid, meaning Gaston consumes between 90 and 120 ounces for breakfast. Simply not possible!
And what about the risk of salmonella from consuming raw eggs?
If Gaston is telling the truth, he could drop dead any minute.
Oh wait, he already did.
Magdalene Taylor
Magdalene Taylor is a staff writer at MEL. She covers internet culture, sex and the online adult industry. She lives in Brooklyn but is from God's Country, Western Massachusetts.
