Soy, Slow Suicide

I have hated soy for years.  In fact, like many other things I get on a soapbox about, my friends and family get tired of the tirades about how irresponsible the FDA has been with soy products.

There is no good reason for taking that stuff and if you are using any soy product extensively you need to stop it.  AND if you are feeding it to you kids you need to really stop it.

Here’s why:

Soy products contain numerous compounds that are toxic to both humans and animals.  You will find them referred to as “anti-nutrients”.  Somehow the powers that be in the soy industry think “anti-nutrient” will not bother people as much as “toxin”.

Soy contains several naturally occurring compounds that are toxic to humans and animals.  The soy industry frequently refers to these toxins as anti-nutrients, which implies that they somehow act to prevent the body getting the complete nutrition it needs from a food.  The soy toxins (such as phytic acid) can certainly act in this manner, but they also have the ability to target specific organs, cells and enzyme pathways and their effects can be devastating.

Toxins that can be found in soy are:

• protease inhibitors
•  phytic acid
•  soy lectins
•  nitrosamines
• manganese concentrations
• soyatoxin
• Nitrosamines are  formed during the processing of things like isolated soy protein

All soy products contain soy toxins.  Protease inhibitors interfere with the body’s ability to break down and use protein.  Interestingly exposure to protease inhibitors in rats leads to pancreatic cancer, as well as making the rats susceptible to other cancers.  When this information was presented to the USFDA they questioned the validity of the study because they felt that a rat’s system was different than a human’s …however they continue, as far as I know, to study the effects of other things on rats to see if something is safe for humans….Which seems a little odd to me.  However….

The soy plant has the unique ability to absorb large amounts of manganese from the soil.  While some of this is important for your nutritional, excessive amounts of it have been linked with neurological damage.  Soy infant formula can contain up to TWO HUNDRED times the manganese of breast milk.  Researchers believe that for every eight babies raised on soy milk for six months, one will have behavioral problems that do not become evident until adolescence.   

There is a ton more but lets skip to something called phyto-estrogens.

You have heard that menopausal women should take soy to help with hot flashes and such, right? Let me ask you a question.  If you were on hormone replacement therapy would you give your adolescent son one of your pills? Would you feed you baby birth control pills?

I don’t think so!  Yet many boys are being given soy milk to drink. Consider this, Infants exclusively fed soy formula receive the equivalent of at least five birth control pills per day in estrogen.  These babies have up to 22,ooo times more estrogen compounds in their blood than breast fed babies, or babies on non-soy based formulas.

Phytoestrogens are linked to the early sexual development of girls. More and more pediatricians are seeing girls that are as young as 7 or 8 with breast development and pubic hair.  That is bad enough but in boys phytoestrogens are very very bad.

Estrogen inhibits testosterone development.  In fact, boy babies have a period of time in the first three months or so when there is  a testosterone  surge that shows levels as high as an adult male.  During this time their brains and bodies are programmed to have male characteristics after puberty, physically as well as mentally.  It is during this time that characteristic male behavior is …hmmm….uploaded to the brain.

And this is not even all of it.  Before you drink one more glass of soy milk I suggest you do some research on what you are taking in to your body.

Soy Myths 

The Toxicity of Soy 

Soy 

Google “the dangers of soy” and see what you come up with.