The Raw-Meat-Eating Guy Is Back On Instagram

Social media encourages some pretty unusual behavior sometimes. Often, those behaviors involve chicken. And right now, an Instagram user with 391,000 followers is undertaking a particularly gnarly poultry experiment. The user, who simply goes by John, has been posting to an account called @rawchickenexperiment. Given that handle, I bet you can guess what he's tasked himself with.

In a nutshell, John is eating raw chicken every day for an indeterminate period of time until he gets "a tummy ache," according to the first post on his account. In case you're worried he'll get thirsty, don't worry—he washes the chicken down with... a glass of raw eggs.

John spoke to People in an exclusive interview about what he's doing and what he hopes to achieve. Basically, it amounts to a form of rebellion.

"Whenever someone tells me not to do something, it always makes me a little interested more," he told the magazine. "This time was with chicken."

His definition of feeling unwell is a little loose, since a "tummy ache" doesn't really specify a level of sickness. And speaking of loose, in order to track how he's feeling, John has been describing how his stomach feels each day and the qualities of his bowel movements in every caption. So far, so good, as in there haven't been any, uh, inconsistencies on that front.

The situations in which this eating stunt is performed are taking on a grander scale, too. Most of his initial videos were outdoors and solo, sitting in front of trees, but the more recent videos have involved other people.

For example, John filmed himself in a dentist's office, sitting in an examining chair. An actual dentist, New York–based Alex Shalman, enters the room bearing a tray of raw chicken breasts. The two then tear into raw chicken, following it up with glasses of raw eggs. The next video after that, Day 20, appears to be filmed on a New York City sidewalk, with people walking by in the background.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that raw chicken can be "contaminated with Campylobacter, Salmonella, or Clostridium perfringens germs."

Sickness caused by all three types of bacteria involve some sort of stomach upset, such as diarrhea or vomiting. Most healthy people bounce back, but some of the population, such as infants, the elderly, and those with compromised immune systems, can experience severe symptoms and in some cases be hospitalized.

Eating raw eggs also carries its own risk, as they can be tainted with salmonella as well. That being said, I've had raw egg preparations, such as on steak tartare at restaurants, with no ill effects, but those are my own gambles.

John has previously dabbled in lots of raw meat eating. He's documented the habit on his YouTube channel, with some of the videos dating as far back as two years.

We previously covered his adventures in 2022, when he was... doing the same exact thing, just with a range of meats instead of exclusively chicken. Back then, he claimed that eating raw meat helped with some chronic health issues he had been experiencing, but it's admittedly hard to tell when someone's being serious on the internet.

I guess the ambiguity just creates room for more interest. At the time we wrote about John's 2022 stunt, he was already 83 days into the experiment, so we already know he's capable of staying in this thing for the long haul. For his other meals throughout each day, he says he's still incorporating cooked food into his diet, and he's made it 25 days into @rawchickenexperiment so far. The human immune system is an amazing thing—and so is the digestive system.