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To: Sonora
Does this article represent the general conservative view?

Evidently you're one of those people who think science is a political tool rather than a discipline based upon empirical observation. You probably also believe that we know everything about global climate and can control it by changing human behavior.

The empirical fact is that soy contains estrogen analogs..

http://www.mothering.com/articles/growing_child/food/soy_story.html

Male infants experience a testosterone surge during the first few months of life and produce androgens in amounts equal to those of adult men. So much testosterone at such a tender age is needed to program the body for puberty, the time when a male's sex organs should develop and he should begin to express male characteristics such as facial and pubic hair and a deep voice. If receptor sites intended for the hormone testosterone are occupied by soy estrogens, however, appropriate development may never take place.71-74 To date, most of the evidence damning soy formula can be found only in animal studies, because investigations in which humans' sex hormone levels are lowered experimentally cannot ethically be done. However, in the years since soy formula has been in the marketplace, parents and pediatricians have reported growing numbers of boys whose physical maturation is either delayed or does not occur at all. Breasts, underdeveloped gonads, undescended testicles (cryptorchidism), and steroid insufficiencies are increasingly common. Sperm counts are also falling.75-79

Soy formula is bad news for girls as well. Natural estrogen levels approximately double during the first month of life, then decline and remain at low levels until puberty. With increased estrogens in the environment in the diet, an alarming number of girls are entering puberty much earlier than normal.80-82 One percent of girls now show signs of puberty, such as breast development or pubic hair, before the age of three. By the age of eight, 14.7 percent of Caucasian girls and 48.3 percent of African American girls had one or both of these characteristics.83 The fact that blacks experience earlier puberties than whites is not a racial difference but a recent phenomenon.84, 85

27 posted on 12/13/2006 10:55:27 AM PST by E. Pluribus Unum (Islam is a religion of peace, and Muslims reserve the right to kill anyone who says otherwise.)
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To: E. Pluribus Unum; Sonora
The empirical fact is that soy contains estrogen analogs

Yeah, so what? Saying that isoflavones are phytoestrogens is just another gross mischaracterization of the issue by those who don't understand it. Unlike estrogen, isloflavones are tissue selective and can have estrogen-like effects in some tissue but either no effects or antiestrogenic effects in other tissues. There are a number of recent studies that clearly show how different isoflavones are from estrogen. Applying the term phytoestrogen to isoflavones is terribly misleading since it doesn't fully or accurately describe isoflavones.

All your link has shown us is that correlations can be indicative but in most cases they don't prove a thing.

48 posted on 12/13/2006 12:06:01 PM PST by Mase (Save me from the people who would save me from myself!)
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