i'm going to respectfully disagree with the dr on this one, having taken a look at this issue as a vegan myself. moderation with anything is good, but my soy intake is probably well above normal, with, anecdotally, no ill effects on my existing gyne one way or the other in almost 20 years. here's my take, reprinted from a past post.
the “estrogen” you hear about is actually phytoestrogens which are actually generally good for you, they have something like 1/500th the effect of regular estro and as i understand it actually compete with regular for chemical receptors and could therefore actually inhibit the estro effect.
this always smells like scare tactics from the frightened boys in the dairy and beef industry who i think are the REAL culprits. since this comes up from time to time, excuse me if i quote from a past post on the subject. i left out the parts on recent studies of arsenic in chicken, pcb's in fish, etc., though that was nasty too. for the record, i'm also vegan, meaning pure vegetarian, no eggs or dairy (for ethics reasons more than the health, though that's a plus too), so see if you find this interesting. from the 2/04 monthly newsletter of dr. michael greger:
V. MAILBAG: "Why did the Ukraine ban our meat?"
I just got an email from someone who read the hilarious column in Friday's San Francisco Chronicle (online at http://tinyurl.com/2b2qr) . Her questions was "I've heard about bovine growth hormone in the milk supply, but I didn't know that we used hormones in meat."
For more than fifty years, U.S. farmers have used both natural and artificial hormones to increase the growth rates of livestock. Just like bodybuilders can bulk up on steroids, these steroid hormones make cattle grow bigger and faster. Of course the USDA doesn't like to call them growth hormones, they call them "meat quality enhancers," which they note is a "more consumer friendly term."
According to the USDA, these hormones can eliminate as many as 21 days of feeding time-same weight, 21 days earlier-which saves lots of money. But Europe in the eighties had just gotten over this thing where little babies started growing breasts and menstruating after eating baby food made from veal calves pumped with the hormone DES and then there were all these cancers and genital deformities and so January 1st, 1989 Europe banned the production and consumption of hormone laden meat.
Major beef exporters such as Argentina. Australia, New Zealand, Brazil all agreed to ship hormone free meat to Europe, but the U.S. was not going to be stopped. Not only would the profits of the beef industry suffer (and we know how much the beef industry doesn't like to see things suffer Wink, but the profits of the hormone manufacturers- Monsanto, Eli Lilly, Upjohn-would take a hit. And as powerful as the beef lobby is, you do not mess with the pharmaceutical industry.
The US took the European Union before the World Trade Organization demanding that Europe drop its ban on American beef. And of course, the World Health Organization struck down Europe's public health law, and demanded Europe drop the ban or face stiff penalties. And Europe decided to maintain the ban and stomach the financial consequences, which it has for years now. They are willing to pay $50 million dollars a year to protect their citizens from American beef.
Growth promoting hormones, with names like "Steer-oid" are fed, implanted or injected into more than 95% of U.S. cattle. They implant estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and a number of synthetic steroids. The FDA insists that, when properly used, these sex steroids pose no risk to humans. This is the same agency, though, that, under pressure from the poultry industry, took 20 years to ban DES, the hormone that caused all the v.aginal cancers in the daughters of mothers exposed to it.
The European Union commissioned their own panel of scientists review the available research on the hormones in American meat and concluded that they "may cause a variety of health problems including cancer, developmental problems, harm to immune systems, and brain disease. Even exposure to small levels of [hormone] residues in meat and meat products carries risks."
The European Commission identified one hormone in particular as a "complete carcinogen," acting as both a tumor initiator and a tumor promoter. They explained, "In plain language, this means that even small additional doses of residues of this hormone in meat, arising from its use as a growth promoter in cattle, has an inherent risk of causing cancer." The French Agriculture Minister simply declared that the United States had the, "worst food in the world." Even research done here by National Cancer Institute has found that some of the synthetic estrogen-like hormones U.S. ranchers continue to implant can indeed stimulate the growth of human breast cancer cells.
The U.S. government was not happy with Europe's report. The U.S. Agriculture Secretary held a press conference and said 'The European Commission has issued yet another misleading report."
In response the European Union replied, "The commission is deeply concerned about the US attempt to belittle the risk which scientists have identified. [We] cannot understand why the US has not reacted in a more responsible way to the conclusive findings of the scientific committee. It is all the more incomprehensible as pre-pube[scent] children are the population group most at risk from the hormones."
Indeed, because children they have such low baseline levels, an 8 year boy, for example, eating two burgers increases his level of sex hormones by almost 10%. And lifelong exposures like that might increase the risk of developing cancer.
The incidence of reproductive cancers has skyrocketed since U.S. farmers started using these sex steroids in meat. Compared to 1950, we have 55% more breast cancer, 120% more testicular cancer, and 190% more prostate cancer here in the United States. Now that's not to say that the hormones in meat are the cause, but as one prominent cancer researcher noted, "The question we ought to be asking, is not why Europe won't buy our hormone-treated meat, but why we allow beef from hormone-treated cattle to be sold [here in America]..."
so far from being a culprit, i bet soy would keep us
safer from gyne that i suspect has taken off in the last half century specifically because of the same meat and dairy industry, who time might just prove are to blame for this curse instead.
Topic: gyno and soy (Read 16794 times)
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