Equol in milk of dairy cows is derived from forage legumes such as red clover

The intake of isoflavones and the resulting equol contents of both plasma and milk of the same red clover-fed cows are reported for the first time in cyclic change-over design study. Cows were fed four different red clover silages and two timothy–meadow fescue silages as controls. The red clover silages contained daidzein, formononetin, biochanin A and genistein, whereas the timothy–meadow fescue silages contained no isoflavones. We found a strong association (y = 0·071x+2·75, R 2 0·71) between the formononetin intake (x) and equol concentration (y) in the plasma, while the formononetin intake and milk equol concentration were weakly associated (y = 0·0035x+0·358, R 2 0·20). This means that a small part of the total formononetin in the silage is secreted into milk as equol. The mean equol contents in plasma and milk of cows fed red clover silage diets were in the range of 4·6–8·4 mg/l and 458–643 μg/l, respectively, while the respective values for the control diets were in the range of 0·8–1·5 mg/l and 171–287 μg/l. We showed that shorter growing periods of red clover resulted in higher silage formononetin contents and plasma and milk equol contents, suggesting that the equol content of milk can be manipulated by varying the harvesting strategy of red clover. We conclude that milk equol is derived from the formononetin of red clover silage and that milk from red clover-fed cows can be considered as a source of equol in human nutrition.