Research uncovers why issues with soy can sometimes masquerade as egg allergies and what to do about it. You might possibly be able to eat eggs again!
The incidence of pediatric food allergies, sometimes life-threatening, is rapidly on the rise. Since 1993, the number of children with food allergies, particularly to the “Big-8” increased over 18 percent. These foods are eggs, wheat, milk, tree nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, and soy. What’s more, the number of those seeking treatment for a food allergy-related condition at a hospital emergency room tripled!
These official numbers seem too low when observing the prevalence of food allergies in everyday situations.
In my daughter’s preschool class, for example, only she and one other child had no food allergies at all in a class of twelve! This means that over 80% of the class suffered from at least one food allergy serious enough to require the teacher to maintain a list to refer to during snacks and mealtimes.
In school lunchrooms, the discussion regularly touches on who is allergic to what foods with children sometimes challenged as untruthful if they insist they have no allergies at all.
Food allergies have become the norm rather than the exception for the Millennial Generation.
Egg allergies are one of the most difficult for parents to handle as this eliminates not only eggs but any product containing them. This is tragic as eggs are Nature’s perfect food with important building blocks for a child’s growing body including choline, B12, arachidonic acid, and other critical brain-building fats.
Soft boiled egg yolk whether from chicken or duck eggs is the perfect first food for a baby for this reason. Goose egg yolks are also an excellent option, though they are less commercially available.
Health Canada recommends it over cereal grains for this purpose due to the abundant anthropological evidence of its use by Aboriginal cultures.
Not only nutrient-dense, but eggs are also the most inexpensive form of complete protein and are typically one of the easiest nutrient-rich foods to obtain locally.
Eggs made up the bulk of my diet during graduate school. They were one of the few whole, unprocessed foods I could afford on a meager budget of $400/month living in a large, expensive city.
What to do with an egg allergy?
The first thing to do is realize that your egg allergy may, in fact, be a soy allergy in disguise!
This conundrum can occur because the chicken feed used by both conventional and organic egg farms is loaded with soy.
Why soy and not some other form of protein? Well, soy is cheap for one and helps the chickens grow and mature faster for another.
Soy helps keep eggs cheap and that’s why it is favored as a common ingredient in chicken feed.
Soy Fed to Chickens Ends Up in Their Eggs
According to Dr. Kaayla Daniel in her article Second-hand Soy from Animal Feeds, four studies to date indicate soy phytoestrogens, known as isoflavones, end up in the egg yolks of chickens fed soy-based feed with one study showing that they end up in the chicken liver, heart, kidney, and muscle meat too.
In the first study, researchers from the Food Research and Development Laboratories in Shizuoka, Japan fed laying hens a diet with a high concentration of soy phytoestrogens (isoflavones).
They followed up by measuring isoflavone levels in their blood and egg yolks. Over a span of 18 days, the isoflavones peaked at 65.29 mcg/100 grams on day 12 and remained at this level for the remainder of the experiment.
Follow-Up Research
A few years later, scientists published follow-up research to the study above, reporting that they had found the most active form of soy isoflavones known as equol in the egg yolk of soy-fed chickens.
Research out of the University of Maryland and reported in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry found that eggs from quail fed with feed containing the soy isoflavone genistein had this substance in the egg yolk but not the egg white.
Finally, in 2009, an Ohio State University grad student completed his master’s thesis on the Quantification of Soy Isoflavones in Commercial Eggs and their Transfer from Poultry Feed into Eggs and Tissue.
His experiments involved 48 laying hens that were divided into groups and fed either soy-free feed, a regular feed containing 25 percent soybean meal, or a special, high soy feed with 500 extra isoflavones per 100 grams.
The experiments proved the rapid accumulation of soy isoflavones from chicken feed into eggs and tissues. The chickens fed the high soy diet produced eggs that contained yolks with a whopping 1000 mcg of isoflavones per 100 grams!
Good News if You Have a Soy Allergy
The eggs from chickens fed soy-based feed do indeed pose a threat to those with a soy allergy. It may also confusingly present as an egg allergy. However, there is some very good news to share.
Within 10 days of switching to a soy-free chicken feed, no trace of isoflavones remained in the eggs. This is the case even if the hens had grown up and fully matured eating soy-based feed!
Thus, if you think you are allergic to eggs, simply switching to soy-free eggs may solve the problem!
Whatever you do, don’t throw up your hands and turn to the common egg replacer called aquafaba chickpea water. This anti-nutrient laced pseudo-food is dangerous to health and contributes to leaky gut and the development of autoimmune disease.
Even Organic Eggs are Usually Soy Fed
As you search for soy-free eggs, know that all commercial and even organic eggs use soy-based chicken feed! In the 2009 study from Ohio State University grad student Vargas Galdos described above, eighteen brands of eggs were examined.
Every single one whether commercial or organic, free-range or caged, contained soy isoflavones.
While variations from egg to egg were observed, the total isoflavone content per egg consistently ranged from 33mcg to 139mcg per 100g of egg yolk.
High Omega-3 Eggs Lower in Soy Isoflavones
Eggs labeled as high omega-3 eggs were the only exception. These specialty eggs showed significantly lower soy isoflavone content.
Why? Most likely because flaxseed or other omega-3 fatty acid source replaced some of the soy in the chicken feed.
What to do then?
The answer is to find a farmer that offers soy-free eggs. Alternatively, raise a few hens in your backyard and feed them soy-free feed.
If being a backyard farmer isn’t possible, take heart because soy-free eggs are increasingly becoming available from local farmers.
They are in high demand by those with a soy allergy and other customers trying to avoid soy isoflavones for health reasons.
How Soy-Free Eggs are Produced
My friends Nathan and Christy Freeman, owners of Restoration Ridge Farm in Dade City, Florida offer soy-free, organic eggs to their customers and are getting rave reviews.
The following email is from a customer who realized her daughter’s egg allergy was really a soy allergy in disguise after trying soy-free eggs for the first time!
Hi Nathan and Christy,
Just have to say how much we love your farm fresh, soy free eggs!
Our daughter has a facial skin condition which has been linked to soy intolerance and discovered that this condition also appeared when she consumed eggs. Since most chicken feed seems to be soy-based, she had all but given up on the idea of having eggs in her diet again (both for baking and in cooking) because of this adverse reaction but after trying the eggs produced by your chickens, she has had absolutely no skin reaction at all !! Best part…they are delicious too!
Kind regards,
Beth
Time to Try Soy Free Eggs!
Is an allergy to eggs been your stumbling block to eating them in the past? If so, perhaps it’s time to give soy-free eggs a shot! You may find that you can enjoy Nature’s perfect food without symptoms.
Sources
Second-hand Soy from Animal Feeds
Allergenic Foods and Their Allergens
Child Food Allergies on the Rise in the US
More Information
170 Scientific Reasons to Lose the Soy in Your Diet
Baby First Foods
Why Soy Formula, Even Organic, is So Dangerous for Babies
Egg Beaters: Food for Fools
Why Organic Store Eggs are a Scam
Estrogenic Foods Like Soy Trigger Precancerous Breasts
Is Soy Lecithin Really So Unhealthy?
I’m blessed to have a neighbor who owns a soy free feed company. It’s H&H Soy Free non-GMO Feed, and you can find it on facebook. I know they can mail it. We use it, and love it.
I read an article a while back, where a woman figured her son’s egg allergy was not the eggs themselves, but the soy-based feed contaminating the eggs… and meat.
We got chickens this spring. I am slowly eating a little scrambled egg at a time, just to be sure. So far, no reaction at all. The flavor of the eggs is outstanding, like I remember as a child, pre-soy feeds.
I cannot wait to have an egg salad sandwich. The roosters that popped up in the batch of chicks are soy-free, meaning their meat is safe for me too. Luckily, the local pasture-raised cows and pigs are not fed soy. Whew!
Timely article…my husband was ordering our chicken feed today from a local provider and found out some interesting information. The government does not allow farmers to plant GMO crops on wildlife refuges. It seems that there is more care and concern for wildlife than human life.
I’m so happy I can eat eggs with no issues, although soy does bother me. I have no backyard to raise chickens so I buy pastured eggs at $6-8 per dozen. I can’t afford the $15 for soy free ones so I’ll just have to hope greater demand for them will lead to them becoming more common and more inexpensive.
Soy is cheap; that’s why it’s so prevalent in our food.
Since soy mimics the hormone estrogen then couldn’t it be another reason why our children go through puberty at 12 instead of 15 years of age as they use to less than 100 years ago? Are not hormones a factor in stimulating cancer cell growth?
In the interest of making a profit (and I work for a profit making company and always have) we may be killing ourselves.
Is there solid evidence out there that soy is a problem? If it is then we as citizens have to get that message into our representatives to make changes because companies will not stop looking for cheap ingredients unless a law evens the playing field.
I had an egg allergy for almost 3 decades (started at 21 and I am now 54). For the last 3 years we have kept our own chickens, feeding them organic food and letting them forage. Somehow my egg allergy is gone. I can eat my eggs with no problems.
Thank you for this article. I had often wondered if this was true, because my son is dangerously allergic to soy. Soy is near the top of his list of his IgE allergens according both to blood tests and experience. Eggs were not an allergen on his IgE test, but were on the IgG test. Perhaps soy remaining in eggs is at least part of the reason.
My daughter has multiple allergies. One of which is eggs. We figured this out a while ago by trying different types of eggs. i.e. duck, ostrich, and emu. We find them occasionally at the farmer’s market. But in doing so we figured out it was the soy in the feed because if we got the eggs from other places she would react. She gets hives 6 hours after consuming them. Her allergy test show an allergy to the yolk not the white. Usually egg allergies are to egg whites.
We have areown chickens but it can be difficult to find soy free feed. We now buy soy free feed through a buying group here in phoenix. And woila! She can eat them with no problems! I still bake egg free so as not to overload her system(just in case) and also when taking treats to school for anyone else with allergies. She also has no problem eating chicken either. I have not yet tried the soy free eggs available at the store. When are chickens slow their laying, we will see.
I have not tried this with dairy however. She can have sheep cheese and yogurt but cannot have cow or goat milk(even raw). I do notknow if soy is the cause but it is possible as many animal feeds are soy based. She also is allergic to beef (yes the meat and pastured too). Presumably sheep are solely pastured and not feed supplemented. We have yet to try raw cow milk that is a2 and non gmo and soy free. But shehas such a fear of anything cow related I’m afraid she won’t even try it.
The devil is in those gmos.
I wonder if the eggs used in allergy testing such as the ALCAT would also have soy in them.
Interesting. We feed our chicken org feed, but eggs don’t seem to settle well with anyone in our family, worth a try I guess.