Estrogen in Milk

Diet and Nutrition
21

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
Since your question shows you don’t buy what I had to say on the main question, why would you buy what I would say on your hypothetical question of whether the addition of lactase enzyme would affect estrogen levels?

Anyway, we are still waiting for someone claiming high estrogen levels to provide actual evidence that provides an example such level actually measured in milk sold in the USA.

Instead, we will get something like “The average American has 10 times more uranium in his body than the average Mongolian,” setting some into a panic, who don’t realize that the amount of uranium in an average American is nonetheless some utterly trace value of no consequence.[/quote]

Hi Bill

Don’t get me wrong. I am a scientist myself and it’s clear that further investigation is needed to find more evicence that dietary estrogens (e.g. in milk) are potentially harmfull for humans. Or that cow’s milk is potentially long-term harmful in terms of providing mammal dietary estrogens and affecting human hormonal balance.
All I wanted to do was to give the things I know away. I don’t like to keep information for myself.

So, when it comes to milk and estrogen:

  • Concentrations have been measured several times in several studies. Sometimes they were high, sometimes rather low. I know for sure this has been done in Japan and Germany. For the US I can’t say.
  • Coprrelation between fat content and estrogen concentrations was shown to be highly positive.
  • In MICE, studies showed adverse effects on the reproductive system when mice were feed with cow’s milk. Possibly through gonadotropin release due to the exogenic estrogen provided.
  • In Germany, many diffrent milk brands were tested and the people conducting the study were worried about the high estrogen concentrations.

Since this is not my personal field of research, I do not know all the studies and authors by heart. When I read something that is of interest for my as a bodybuilder, I usually just take a few notes in my training journal and note some names. I do not intend to investigate this to much, since I do not drink milk myself and don’t plan to do it in the future…

But I know there was a study in “Medical Hypothesis” a few years back which related estrogen in cow’s milk to breast and uterine cancer (Ganmaa/Santo).

As far as I remember Elisabeth Rieping did some research on that, too.

In the “journal of agricultural and food chemistry” there was also an article on this topic.

Then I remember the names of two researchers doing studies on this topic. Nielsen and Ma (first name either Xy or Yx…).

I think for people interested in the topic (maybe because they drink a lot of milk and are a bit worried), getting their hands on these papers would be a good idea. One could then go on and read the papers referenced there.

What I said is simply that long-term consumation of high amounts of cow’s milk could have some negative effects on hormonal balance.

22

Hormonal balance is affected by all kinds of things other than directly taking hormones, you know. And unfortunately, studies trying to assign effects seen in the general population to foods suffer from the fact that all else is NEVER the same, and it may very well be, for example, that milk consumption also tended to correlate with something else being different, with that something else being the actual cause.

Or it could be there is a correlation between women’s hormone levels and what foods they like. Cause and effect could be the reverse.

Anyway, we are still lacking example quantitative figures of high estrogen or progesterone levels in milk. I could go and get figures that I have found before, or other figures, and post them but it is the responsibility of the person making the positive claim – here, that milk has high hormone levels – to provide at least a trace of actual evidence.

That hasn’t been done. And won’t be done, because levels other than ones destroying the argument won’t be found. Why credibility is being given to it, I can’t quite get.

23

I believe I remember reading an article on this site that had lists of foods with estradiol equivalency factors of some sort. I remember chicken eggs and soy being relatively high, can’t remember where milk was on the list. I would like very much to reread this article if anybody could help me locate it.

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for those of you who have been making gains by what you’re doing…keep doing it. don’t be stupid and stop because of some random article you read. If drinking a gallon of whole milk a day is advantageous to your bodybuilding and weightlifting endeavors, by all means, DON’T STOP!