Dr. Luc (Luke) van Loon

But these differences exist, but the differences are very small if you compare milk, whey, or egg protein.

Egg is also great from amino acid composition and also digestion and absorption is great.

So all of these things, so we're scientists.

We're trying to figure out what are all the aspects that define digestion and absorption and the capacity to stimulate muscle protein synthesis, what we call postprandial protein handling.

And so we want to know which factors play a role.

But all of, of course, in a normal situation, you have all these factors together.

You have protein quality.

in what matrix that protein is being ingested from a food or a meal, how that protein is processed, how you eat it, and even the body position in which you eat.

And so these are all these different things.

And one of the studies that we've done, for example, is eat eggs or eat eggs in a boiled form or in a raw form.

Now, this is also a little bit of a joke.

Not a joke, but I...

Everybody knows the Rocky movies.

And of course, there's some guys in our lab that love these movies.

And I was actually growing up with those movies.

So you see Rocky getting up at five o'clock in the morning and he gulping down like five raw eggs.

And then he does his training session.

Now, I thought it would be fun to actually see whether instead of having a nature paper, whether we could have a paper with Sly Stallone as a co-author.

So basically what we did, we did a study to see what the digestion and absorption and muscle protein synthesis is after ingesting raw eggs versus cooked eggs.

Now, what is really nice to see, you have exactly the same protein, but cooking actually denatures the protein and results in much more rapid release of these amino acids in the circulation.