Estrogen In Milk

Hasen

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Progesterone is lipophylil (fat-loving). That the amounts of progesterone are lowest in skim milk is exactly what would be expected.

Yes but you said the progesterone was protective. Why would you want lower amounts then?

Use common sense! How could adding fat back into skimmed milk reduce the amount of estrogens by more than 50% as shown in the video?

That was a quote from the study itself. Its not my words, that was their conclusion - go and check it for yourself.

Mittir does that study even mention low fat/skimmed milk? I didn't read it all but the highlighted parts seem to only mention whole milk. I think you're going a bit off track with all these different studies. Maybe you could summarise what you're trying to say there.
 

Travis

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Milk certainly has estrogens in the nanogram per milliliter range. Remesar and colleagues measured total estrogen in whole milk at 460 ng/mL, but most researchers just measure the free estrogen content which are found to be in the picogram per milliliter range. Malenkinejad and colleagues measured 202 pg/mL, and Macrina measured 96.2 pg/mL.
Estrone and Estrone Sulfate Concentrations in Milk and Milk Fractions

Ray Peat seems to avoid this. In his article Milk in context: allergies, ecology, and some myths, Ray mentions the word estrogen fifteen times. He never mentions it in association with milk, even in his article about milk. Here are some quotes:

Since estrogen treatment is known to increase the incidence of asthma and other inflammations...Exposure to estrogen increases intracellular calcium and the unsaturation of fatty acids in tissue lipids...
So he is obviously concerned about exogenous estrogen. Maybe he will warn us about milk....
This means that estrogen and stress cause the appearance of antigens in the human or animal tissues that are essentially the same as the stress-induced and defensive proteins in plant tissues. A crocodile might experience the same sort of allergic reaction when eating estrogen-treated women and when eating commercial bananas.
Wrong analogy. It should read "when eating commercial cheese."
So what does he have to say about milk?
Two other ideas that sometimes cause people to avoid drinking milk and eating cheese are that they are “fattening foods,” and that the high calcium content could contribute to hardening of the arteries.
Some people are worried about hormones in milk too. As an Endocrinologist, you should know this.
What follows reads almost like an advertisement:
When I traveled around Europe in 1968, I noticed that milk and cheese were hard to find in the Slavic countries, and that many people were fat. When I crossed from Russia into Finland, I noticed there were many stores selling a variety of cheeses, and the people were generally slender. When I lived in Mexico in the 1960s, good milk was hard to find in the cities and towns, and most women had fat hips and short legs. Twenty years later, when good milk was available in all the cites, there were many more slender women, and the young people on average had much longer legs. The changes I noticed there reminded me of the differences I had seen between Moscow and Helsinki, and I suspect that the differences in calcium intake were partly responsible for the changes of physique.
In recent years there have been studies showing that regular milk drinkers are less fat than people who don't drink it. Although the high quality protein and saturated fat undoubtedly contribute to milk's anti-obesity effect, the high calcium content is probably the main factor.
So Peat totally avoids the issue of estrogen in milk in an article with the word estrogen listed 15 times and the word milk listed 43 times! This is really hard for me to understand, considering Ray Peat is an Endocrinologist.

What is even more shocking, is that in his article Natural Estrogens, the word soy is mentioned 53 times [including references].

The word milk is found only once, hidden in a citation abstract under Potential adverse effects of phytoestrogens.

Does anyone else find this odd?
 
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Giraffe

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Yes but you said the progesterone was protective. Why would you want lower amounts then?
Where did I suggest that one was better than the other one?

My point was that you shouldn't conclude "that they're both bad" because a guy with a vegan agenda says so; the information he presents is biased. Do your own research! Enter "dairy protein health" or "calcium all-cause mortality" into a search engine, and you will find lots of studies that conclude that dairy is protective. If you chose to disregard them because "we know how huge the dairy industry is": Don't drink milk then, and get the nutrients you need from other foods.

That was a quote from the study itself. Its not my words, that was their conclusion - go and check it for yourself.
Does the result make sense to you? How about you check your own posts?
 

Hasen

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My point was that you shouldn't conclude "that they're both bad" because a guy with a vegan agenda says so; the information he presents is biased.

Does that make sense to you? Are you sure you know what vegan is? I'll give you a clue, its not someone who loves whole milk....maybe you should google 'vegan'.

If you chose to disregard them because "we know how huge the dairy industry is"


You chose to disregard an article conducted by scientists other than the guy in the video because the guy in the video is vegan and hence not pro whole milk?!? Can't really get any more messed up than that.

Where did I suggest that one was better than the other one?


Not sure what you're referring to exactly by 'one better than the other one' but you said the progesterone in milk is protective and the study shows that skimmed milk is lowest in progesterone.

Does the result make sense to you? How about you check your own posts?

I'm not a scientist - are you? All I'm saying is that is the conclusion they came to. The replies I've had are all based on the conclusions of scientists in the studies. I'm sure if the scientists that made the study were here to reply to us this thread would be a hell of a lot more informative.
 

Giraffe

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You chose to disregard an article conducted by scientists other than the guy in the video because the guy in the video is vegan and hence not pro whole milk?!?
I was saying that the information he presents is biased and asked you to do your own research.

Wikipedia: Confirmation Bias

Please, stop to deliberately misinterpret my posts.

Can't really get any more messed up than that.
And stop being rude!
 
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Hasen

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"calcium all-cause mortality"

Oh and regarding this. These are the most flawed studies we see. Protein is good therefore meat is good...calcium is good therefore milk is good. Calcium =/= milk. The best studies are on foods, not the effects of individual substances and trying to attribute their benefits to foods that contain them. The whole supplement industry thrives on the studies of individual vitamins, minerals etc that make up food when in fact it was more likely a certain food as a whole that was proven to have those benefits rather than the single isolate nutrient.

This is also what spawned the whole hatred against saturated fat. They found meat was bad and caused all these problems....then they decided to blame something....something that can be easily cut off of meat...ie the fat. When in fact its meat that is bad, not necessarily just saturated fat and in fact it seems its not even saturated fat at all.
 

schultz

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When in fact its meat that is bad

I would argue that meat is not "bad" or "good". Meat can be beneficial in certain amounts. Meat has important nutrients and quality protein. Meat can also be problematic because it is high in certain amino acids and phosphorus, which gives it the potential to cause an imbalance.

As far as the estrogen in milk goes, it's a very small amount. I really think it's a non issue. Skim milk has the majority of its estrogen in the conjugated, and biologically inactive, form so that estrogen is very likely to just be excreted by the body and not pose any problem. The free form of the estrogen, that is higher in whole and 2%, could be absorbed and add to our estrogen load, but I still think it's a very tiny amount.

This graph is from the 2009 study mentioned...


milkestro.jpg
 

Hasen

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I would argue that meat is not "bad" or "good".

My point was that the studies found meat to be bad ie responsible for you name it from cancer to heart disease but they tried to blame it all one just one thing contained in meat - ie saturated fat. It works well because its something you can just cut out and go on eating meat. The zillion dollar meat industry need worry not. But as we know there are many things bad in meat, for one Peat is big on the problems with methionine so advises cutting down on muscle meats.

As far as the estrogen in milk goes, it's a very small amount. I really think it's a non issue. Skim milk has the majority of its estrogen in the conjugated, and biologically inactive, form so that estrogen is very likely to just be excreted by the body and not pose any problem. The free form of the estrogen, that is higher in whole and 2%, could be absorbed and add to our estrogen load, but I still think it's a very tiny amount.
View attachment 3671

Maybe its a small amount, maybe its not. It also all depends on how much dairy you consume and how often. Maybe its ok if you just have a little in your coffee once a day although many other products contain dairy too.

You can say its a non issue but try telling that to the scientists that have conducted studies going from here to the end of the Earth and back for decades that found all kinds of problems with milk, from cancer and hair loss, to heart disease and osteoporosis and back again. As they say in a murder trial, I think as far as milk is concerned, there is 'reasonable doubt' here.
 

Mittir

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Milk certainly has estrogens in the nanogram per milliliter range. Remesar and colleagues measured total estrogen in whole milk at 460 ng/mL, but most researchers just measure the free estrogen content which are found to be in the picogram per milliliter range. Malenkinejad and colleagues measured 202 pg/mL, and Macrina measured 96.2 pg/mL.
Estrone and Estrone Sulfate Concentrations in Milk and Milk Fractions

Ray Peat seems to avoid this. In his article Milk in context: allergies, ecology, and some myths, Ray mentions the word estrogen fifteen times. He never mentions it in association with milk, even in his article about milk.

RP addressed this issue in interviews and email response.
Here is one quote from peatarian email exchange.

"[ESTROGEN IN MILK] High estrogen, relative to progesterone, interferes with lactation, and the enzymes that convert estradiol to the less active estrone and estriol are increased by progesterone. The amount of estradiol in milk is usually much less than one microgram per liter, and it's concentrated in the cream, so low-fat milk has very little estrogen. The cow's diet is probably a more important factor in the estrogen content of milk than pregnancy. The information in that abstract isn't enough to tell whether the study was done properly. "-RP

Total amount of estrogen found in the studies done by Remesar is abnormally
high compared to other studies that measured both free and conjugated estrogen.
If Remesar number is right and other studies are wrong then we are getting
460,000 ng estrogen from 1 liter of milk, which is almost 3 times higher than an adult male
produce every day. A female produce 630,000 ng/day. The author of the study proposed an explanation as to why Ramesar's number is so high.

"
Possible reasons for differences in estrogen concentrations
among studies include sample processing and antibody cross-
reactivity with other estrogens or cholesterol. The
methodology used in our study effectively separated E 1
from other estrogens and cholesterol. Even a small cross-reactivity
of the E1 antibody with the milligrams per milliliter concen-
trations of cholesterol in milk could lead to greatly inflated
values for E 1 and E 1S
. In the two studies reporting nanograms
per milliliter concentrations of total E1 ,it was unclear
whether cholesterol was removed from the samples before analysis
."
Estrone and Estrone Sulfate Concentrations in Milk and Milk Fractions
 
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Travis

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Shultz was kind enough to post a graph from Quantitative measurement of endogenous estrogen metabolites, risk-factors for
development of breast cancer, in commercial milk products by LC–MS/MS
.
In this study, the used liquid chromatography to detect 10 different types of estrogen molecules. They used known internal standards to calibrate the spectrometer.

This is surely more accurate than radioimmunoassay in my opinion, which does have the potential to detect other sterols besides estrogen. W know from the article Exposure to exogenous estrogens in food: possible impact on human development and health that radioimmunoessay is not accurate enough to measure serum estrogen concentrations in children. Looking at Table 3, it could not detect estradiol in (44%) of preadolescent boys age 10-13. Radioimmunoessay has a detection limit of ~5 pg/ml.

So can chromatography tell the difference between estradiol and testosterone? Yes. There is a free Mass Spectra Library at mzcloud.org if you have any doubts. Even though radioimmunoassay is quite an inventive technique, it is absolutely trumped by chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry. I don't think there is a more accurate method than this for detecting trace amounts of organic molecules. For this reason, I am going to give more weight to the values in this study.

Two-percent milk had a total estrogen content of 425 pg/mL. This is equivalent to 425 ng/L and .425 μg/L. Let us consider the Ray Peat quote that Mittir posted above:
The amount of estradiol in milk is usually much less than one microgram per liter, and it's concentrated in the cream, so low-fat milk has very little estrogen.
He is right that there is less than one microliter per liter, but this study indicates a larger content in skim than whole: [skim>2%>whole]. Since estrogen is fat-soluble this may seem odd, but there exists a protein molecule humans called sex hormone-binding globulin which bonds a great deal of estrogen. There might be a similar protein in milk that binds estrogen.
 
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Makrosky

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Nice info Travis, thanks!

I think it is still a small ammount of estrogen, don't you think ?
 

Travis

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Yes, but these are hormones and small amounts can have big effects. I think we need to find out how much is produced endogenously to see if 425 micrograms is capable of having an effect on people.
 

Travis

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I think 425 pg/mL is equal to 0.425 micrograms per litre.

I know, I just fixed it seconds before your post. I was off by a factor of 1000. I jumped straight from pico- to micro- and totally forgot about nano-. Ray is right, there is less that one microliter per liter of milk, close to half of one microliter per liter total estrogen.
 

milk_lover

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@Travis how about progesterone and thyroid in milk? Don't you think they can help offset the small amounts of estrogen? Ok how about milk's calcium lowering PTH and therefore lowering prolactin and estrogen? How about milk's calcium increasing metabolism which can help with containing estrogen? How about the bioavailable protein in milk that helps with estrogen deactivation? What I am trying to say the benefits of good quality milk is so much bigger than the disadvantages. The quest is to find a source that is clean, tasty, and it agrees with your body.
 

Travis

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For accurate determinations of serum estrogen, look no further than Liquid Chromatography–Tandem Mass Spectrometry Assay for Simultaneous Measurement of Estradiol and Estrone in Human Plasma. The authors spend some time praising this technique:
However, many E1 and E2 immunoassays have limited functional sensitivity, suffer from cross-reactivity, and display poor intermethod agreement. To overcome these problems, we developed a sensitive liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/ MS) assay for the simultaneous measurement of E1 and E2...Recoveries were 93–108% for E1 and 100–110% for E2. No cross-reactivity was observed. Method comparison with several immunoassays revealed that the latter were inaccurate and prone to interferences at low E1 and E2 concentrations. Conclusions: LC-MS/MS allows rapid, simultaneous, sensitive, and accurate quantification of E1 and E2 in human serum. © 2004 American Association for Clinical Chemistry
And they spend more time bashing the radioimmunoassay technique:
High-sensitivity E2 immunoassays are challenging because physiologic serum concentrations of E2 are typically 140 pmol/L (40 ng/L) in adult men and postmenopausal women and in both sexes during infancy and childhood. None of the commercially available automated direct E2 assays appears to have sufficient sensitivity for the evaluation of E2 in the sera of children and men...s. College of American Pathologists survey results for the past few years confirm that the performance of direct E2 immunoassays needs to improve with respect to analytical accuracy and detection limit.
And their asertion that this is the most accurate technique:
E1 and E2 assays based on gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS) address many of the shortcomings of automated immunoassays and RIAs, and they are considered to be the most accurate methodology (22).
Figure 3 lists the estradiol and estrone concentrations of men and woman on two scatter plots. You can notice that the female estrogen concentrations are all over the place, but the male concentrations are all around 100 pmol/L. This has been confirmed by this study when they said "The normal range of E2 levels found in fertile men was 70 to 200 pmol/L." Estrone has a molecular mass of 270.366 g/mol and estradiol has a molecular mass of 272.38 g/mol [Converting moles to grams] . So for males they measured, the average serum concentrations for estrone is ~27.0 pg/L and ~27.2 ng/L estradiol. The sum of average estradiol and estrone is ~54 ng/L.

This falls within the reference ranges of 10–60 ng/L for estradiol and 10–40 ng/L for estrone. This would make the total estradiol + estrone reference range in males about 20-100 ng/L, which is in agreement with the scatter-plot rough average of ~54 ng/L.

I think that 50 ng/L is a good average male value of total serum estadiol + estrone. The value for females are all over the place.
 

Travis

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My values of total estrogen concentrations are 425 ng/L in 2% milk, and around 50 ng/L in male plasma.

These figures were both determined by HPLC-MS.

Males my size tend to have about 3 liters of plasma in their body, leading me to conclude that one liter of 2% milk has nearly 3x my total plasma estrogen content.

But thankfully, my past dairy consumption hasn't given me man-boobs. But judging by the estrogen concentrations previously mentioned, I don't think that we should discount the possibility that dairy products can produce hormonal effects.
 
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Giraffe

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My values of total estrogen concentrations are 425 ng/L in 2% milk, and around 50 ng/L in male plasma.
Aren't you comparing apples and oranges? The number for the total estrogens in the milk includes more estrogen metabolites than just E1 and E2. Plus they found very little unconjugated E1 and E2 in the milk.

Ray Peat said:
Estrogen is inactivated, mainly in the liver and brain, by being made water soluble by the attachment of glucuronic acid and/or sulfuric acid.

This is the definitation of conjugation.

Here a pic from the study;

Fig5.GIF
 

Travis

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Estrogen is inactivated, mainly in the liver and brain, by being made water soluble by the attachment of glucuronic acid and/or sulfuric acid.
Inactivated? I thought the only purpose of conjugation was to make the molecule water-soluble. Estrone sulfate is almost 3 times more water-soluble than estrone. [3.6 mg/L and 1.3 mg/L] Conjugated estrogens are still bioactive; Premarin is a case in point.

As far as conjugated estrogens being absorbable, let's listen to what Okamoto has to say from the article Equine estrogen-induced mammary tumors in rats:
Equine estrogens composed in Premarin are the 3-sulfate forms called as conjugated equine estrogen. The conjugated equine estrogens taken orally are more effectively absorbed into body through gastrointestine, compared with the free estrogens (Schindler et al., 1982).
More effectively absorbed. So the same increase in solubility effected by sulfate conjugation makes the complex more easily absorbed.
 
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