What's up guys.
This is Dr. Gabrielle Lyon here with my best friend, longtime mentor, Dr. Donald Layman.
And we are going to be talking to you about pea protein, pea and whey.
And here's why I'm doing this, because every time I post something, I think I'm a glutton
for punishment.
Every time I post something on how plant and animal protein are different, it's very offensive
for people.
You and I all know, including Don in the Swiss Alps over here, knows that it's really not
an offensive conversation.
It truly is just a science based conversation in terms of amino acid numbers.
Don is feverishly over there looking for a number to share with you.
And why?
Because I just sprung this on him.
So if you don't know this, him and I talk every day.
Yes, I know it seems extreme, but it's true.
We talk every day and I said, "Hey, I'm working on my book right now, but I want to take a
little break and let's record some stuff."
So what we're going to talk to you about is pea protein and the estrogen in pea protein.
Tell me.
It has one million times more estrogen.
Yeah.
Talk about these animal products, but actually there's 1 million times more estrogen in a
pea protein than there is in something like a whey protein.
Yeah.
It's extremely high in all of the legumes.
So soy and pea and any of the legumes, it's pretty high.
And what people get confused about is in animals, we use a bit of a supplemental hormone, particularly
really more in meat production than in dairy production.
But in meat production, the female cows get a small dose of testosterone, which makes
them grow a little better.
And it's a little ear implant, correct?
It's a very small little implant.
A little small ear implant.
Behind the ear, which slowly dissolves over about a, I think, six to eight week period.
So it's very slow.
In fact, when you look at blood levels, you can't really distinguish it between normal
levels.
There's a little bit there, but there's I think, and again I couldn't find the numbers
right off hand, but the numbers are like-
But they exist.
They exist.
Yeah.
There's a great study out of the University of Oklahoma that went through and compared
the values across a lot of different foods.
And if you look at it, milk and eggs, eggs in particular, have a value.
Now I forget the units, which is what's driving me crazy.
It's like nanograms per gram of protein or something.
But anyway, just for relative numbers, eggs have about 77, meats have about seven.
So it's 10 times higher.
And as you pointed out, legumes are a million.
It's just-
So these strange conversations that people are having about that you shouldn't eat animal
products because these animal products are higher in estrogens and they're higher in
implantable hormones, which is simply just not true.
It's just not true.
And one of the reasons, wait a second.
We're going to talk about why they use a small implant behind the ear of a cow, is to bring
up the hormone levels till their homogeneous.
Right?
Yeah, exactly.
So females of any species have less muscle mass than males.
And so by giving them-
Which is, by the way, totally unfortunate.
Yeah.
But by giving them a small implant of testosterone, they grow a little faster.
Likewise, male cattle have a male based kind of taste.
Right.
And by giving them estrogen, so now they become more uniform.
They can grow in the same feed lots.
They taste about the same, et cetera, et cetera.
So it's a production issue, but the other thing is kind of putting it in a relative
sense, that the legumes have so much.
Well, soy has been looked at extensively in the research literature relative to breast
cancer and things like that.
And people have found that the soy level, a million times, the meat level has no effect.
So people need to get over it.
[crosstalk 00:04:26] I'm so glad you brought that up because that is another important
aspect, that we can isolate these facts and say that you shouldn't eat animals because
there's hormones in it, which all animals have hormones, and that perhaps pea protein
is bad.
Which, I mean, I suppose we don't know the long term effect.
But then the next question is, do we know if these phytoestrogens are having a negative
impact on health?
And those are the endpoint questions that we have to ask.
Again, it gets into amounts at levels that people normally eat legume proteins.
Right?
There's no evidence that there's any negative effects, but what happens if we start eating
four times as much of those forever?
Will that be effective?
We don't know the answer to that.
But what we do know is that those base levels that are in milk or eggs or meats or peas
don't seem to have any negative effects on human hormone levels.
Human long term health.
Yeah.
And so, people drum up comments to make that really don't have science behind them.
But they have a lot of emotion, and this emotion the science, which at some point is so exhausting.
Yeah.
So, I mean, if you're going to make the argument that you shouldn't eat meat or milk or eggs,
because it has hormones in it, then you certainly better not touch any legumes.
Right.
I mean, that's just the bottom line.
All right guys.
Well, we'll keep it short and sweet.
I thought it was very important that we answer this question.
I'm really just touch on this topic of hormones in products, especially hormones in pea protein
and whey and egg, again, because you're hearing a narrative that would, if it wasn't well
thought out, it becomes very confusing.
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