Biotin Deficiency and Egg whites

[L'engle]

I eat a lot of raw egg whites, pasteurized from a carton. They are an easy source of protein tat I don't have to cook. I'm sure everyone here can appreciate the temptation of food that is low effort and high in nutrients. Cooking also degrades the protein content in the egg whites.

However, I have been looking up biotin deficiency in trying to figure out why my energy has tanked in the last month. From wikipedia entry on biotin deficiency:

Eating raw egg whites: Some mistakenly believe that raw egg-white consumption is the only cause of biotin deficiency. Nonetheless, a diet that contains an excess of raw egg whites quickly and almost invariably leads to biotin deficiency.

I've been eating/drinking them every day for months with my protein drink. They are the easiest food imaginable and don't seem to cause me any obvious problems but I am beginning to suspect biotin deficiency. I'm ordering a biotin supplement and probably going to cutback the egg whites from twice a day to once a day. Easy liquid food that is pure protein and can be mixed in with other things so it tastes fine... I guess maybe it is too good to be true.

Has anyone ever had this experience or even heard of it? This is a weird one for me.

PS I can't stand egg yolks and really hate cleaning out frying pans so don't bother trying to sell me on the merits of whole eggs or cooked eggs. Just saying.

 

[alex3619]

This is a known problem. I think something in the egg whites (avidin? I am too busy to resaerch this at the moment) binds biotin. Fortunately biotin is cheap as supplements go. I will do some investigation if I can find time. Bye, Alex

 

[L'engle]

Thanks Alex! It seems there is a complexity to just about everything. I've got some biotin in my b-complex but will definitiely get a biotin supplement in the immediate future.

 

[Sherlock]

yep, the old saw about avidin has been around for a long time. However, that never concerned me because:
1) I wouldn't have raw eggs with every meal, or even every day
2) I wouldn't take my biotin with a raw egg

But your great intake frequency is another matter

Even so, have you considered that egg protein absorption is much less when raw?

http://jn.nutrition.org/content/128/10/1716.long
Digestibility of Cooked and Raw Egg Protein in Humans as Assessed by Stable Isotope Techniques

I haven't read the whole thing but you can just scroll down to Figure 2.



btw, the amount of biotin in a multivitamin is typically tiny. The amount even in a B50 (50 mcg) is still small, compared to what you can get (such as 1000mcg) is a separate tablet.

Besides whey, there is now pea protein and even beef. Casein is also coming back into fashion, to balance out the whey. There is egg protein powder, but that was very hard to mix.

 

[Sherlock]

"healthy volunteers... Amounts of 5.73% and 35.10% (P < 0.005) of cooked and raw test meal, respectively, escaped digestion and absorption in the small intestine"

http://ajpgi.physiology.org/content/277/5/G935.full
Amount and fate of egg protein escaping assimilation in the small intestine of humans

 

[L'engle]

Interesting! I had thought it was the other way around. I think I will go back on the whey and cut back the egg whites to a more reasonable amount.

Thanks for the info!

 

[L'engle]

I have been taking 3000-5000mcg of biotin the last few days and my sleep has been fine. I'm very exhausted though. I think the biotin deficinecy will take a while to clear up as I got somewhat anemic. Also I was reading about biotin and candida. I've been on a candida diet for the last few years but I think the biotin deficiency has allowed it to come back. Biotin is giving me die off symptoms again. If I can get back to where I was at the beginning of the year, before I started eating too much of the egg whites, that will be something. I really hope nobody else gets this weird problem. It's stupid and I've lost months to this.

 

[Sherlock]

I have been taking 3000-5000mcg of biotin the last few days and my sleep has been fine. I'm very exhausted though. I think the biotin deficinecy will take a while to clear up as I got somewhat anemic. Also I was reading about biotin and candida. I've been on a candida diet for the last few years but I think the biotin deficiency has allowed it to come back. Biotin is giving me die off symptoms again. If I can get back to where I was at the beginning of the year, before I started eating too much of the egg whites, that will be something. I really hope nobody else gets this weird problem. It's stupid and I've lost months to this.

Just to mention: biotin is said to prevent the change from the relatively benign yeast form to the evil rhizome/fungal form. From my experience, I believe that's true.

Good gut microbes make biotin, but don't so much when they are crowded out by candida... the usual iner-microbe warfare.

Have you tried MSM? That made a very big difference for me. All other measures were mostly just stopgap. Even Cheney (he of the heart-centric rationales) recommends MSM.

 

[L'engle]

I haven't tried MSM. I will look into it. Thanks!

 

[Sherlock]

I haven't tried MSM. I will look into it. Thanks!

I have the sense that it should be on an empty stomach. It seems to change the internal environment somehow, not just acting as a microbe killer. Maybe it's the sulfur. A pound of crystals is ~$8US

 

[camas]

Raw egg whites are also quite high in histamine, if that's an issue for you.

 

[L'engle]

I've been taking the biotin for 10 days now and the difference is really noticeable. I've been having very poor sleep for the last few months which is unusual form me. Since taking the biotin I'm back to getting 8-10 hours of sleep per night. I still take an hour or two to get to sleep and wake up once or twice in the night and need way more sleep than a healthy person, but this is 'normal' for me and much preferable to the severe insomnia. I've been getting die off from candida as well, which has been weakening me. I'm getting gradually less weak, edging back towards my baseline which is not great but certainly better than I have been recently.

I'm tapering off the biotin now, to 1000-2000mcg per day. I did have a strange sensation in my arms the first night that I had been taking it, sort of like pinched nerves or as if someone was really crushing my arm. But it went away and hasn't happened again.

 

[Lotus97]

I've taken biotin in the past without problems, but then I went a couple weeks without taking much and then when I started taking it again I think it might be causing me problems. Is this possible? There are so many variables that I try to be cautious about attributing cause and effect.

 

[perchance dreamer]

L'engle, please post again if you notice that the biotin starts helping with hair growth. I had been interested in taking it for this reason.

During my last sleep study, I had a reaction to the goop they put on the electrodes for my scalp, and removing the electrodes ripped some of my hair out by the roots. Luckily, it doesn't really show and is growing back, but I'd like to accelerate the process. Gawd, as if sleep studies don't suck enough as it is!

 

[Lotus97]

L'engle, please post again if you notice that the biotin starts helping with hair growth. I had been interested in taking it for this reason.

During my last sleep study, I had a reaction to the goop they put on the electrodes for my scalp, and removing the electrodes ripped some of my hair out by the roots. Luckily, it doesn't really show and is growing back, but I'd like to accelerate the process. Gawd, as if sleep studies don't suck enough as it is!

If you check out the customer reviews on iHerb, there are a lot of people commenting about Biotin and hair growth. MSM is also supposed to be good for hair, skin, and nails.

 

[L'engle]

I only take it every few days now. I get acne if I keep taking it. The deficiency seems to have cleared up, but it took months to recover, since I had become slightly anemic and weakened.

 

[Junto]

I could really talk your ear off about the benefits of egg yolks, but I wont.

Take it easy on the egg whites, especially since your eating them raw. They contain allergens which people like us are typically more sensitive to.

 

[L'engle]

I'm not eating eggs at all right now. There's lots of beneficial foods that I can't convince other people to eat either.

 

[Junto]

Ha ha, fair enough.

 

[Sherlock]

L'engle, that's one of the top pictures here I couldn't put in words why it's so funny, but it sure is.