Soy is Detrimental to the Development of Young Men

PhytoestrogenI made a number of claims here. First I agreed soy has a lot of isoflavone in it. Pro said that according to my own source it doesn't have quite so much as I originally said. OK then – so soy is even less dangerous than I thought. Second I said that this is reduced further by processing. Pro puts this down simply to a reduced concentration. This is false - check his source. It does say that there's only 8g of "soy protein", but the protein is only 40% of the total soybean [1]. While this might seem to mean the isoflavone content should be 1/5th of that of soybeans, this is not the case - instead, it is around 1/15th of beans from Korea, and 1/10th those from Japan [2]. Therefore it cannot be "just concentration". What has more than halved the concentration of phytoestrogen is the extra processing. Third I said it's mostly not even metabolised. Pro said he'd come back to this - he never did. Fourth I said that SERMs do not necessarily have estrogenic effects - it all depends on what kind of tissue receptor they bond to. Pro does not contest this. Pro does say that SERMs can be dangerous, because they can block estrogen receptors (meaning: your body doesn't feel the need to produce so much estrogen). I guess this is a concession that soy actually REDUCES the amount of estrogen in the system, a COMPLETE reversal of his argument from the previous round. The science is, though, that soy actually has no significant net effect on it. In passing, pro mentions blood clots and cancer. In fact, the American Cancer Society agrees that soy can actually REDUCE the risk of cancer [3], and all the research indicates that soy actually stops blood from clotting [4]. The reason why is because different SERMs affect different types of cells, so while some SERMs are dangerous, soy is not. Pro does also not address that WANTING to have more estrogen in your system or be more feminised isn't necessarily a bad thing either, but I'm glad he doesn't and essentially concedes it, because soy products do not significantly increase (or decrease! ) estrogen levels when consumed in normal quantities. "Less soy is better"Apparently pro is making this into a major point now. Like I said last round, all food is bad when not eaten in moderation. If you eat nothing but lettuce for a year, you'd probably be dead from a lack of protein, but that doesn't mean lettuce is bad for your health. Soy is no different - like all foods, it should be eaten in moderation. This debate is about whether eating a typical meal including soy every so often is any more dangerous than eating that same typical meal with a soy substitute. Unless pro can actually demonstrate a substantive harm that comes from eating typical quantities of soy, beyond the remote possibility of there being a tiny granule of an estrogen pill in there, he has no case. Remember: "It would be difficult to consume too much isoflavone from natural soy products", just like it would be difficult to die from eating lettuce. ScienceI find it deeply ironic that pro has attacked my studies for using adults, when ALL of the human studies he cites (all ONE of them) only asked adults too. That "study", by the way, was a survey, and they ONLY surveyed those who had fertility problems, so there wasn't even a control. This from a researcher who then went on to use his own "research" to promote his very own "fertility diet" [5]. And in their report they state quite plainly "Soy food and isoflavone intakes were unrelated to total sperm count, ejaculate volume, sperm motility or sperm morphology in these analyses" [6]. In other words - just as many sperm are there, and just as many sperm still get ejaculated, with and without soy, and that sperm is just as good. And incidentally, this finding means the size of the testicular glands was larger too, as sperm must have been more "spread out" to have had the same quantity. Even so, as one respected scientist noted "This study is confounded by many issues, thus I feel the results should be viewed with a great deal of caution" [8]. ALL the actual experiments ("feed people soy and see if their sperm die") have come back negative. I've provided two meta-analysis studies to prove that. Pro does nothing to contest their findings. Pro does contest the study from Scotland I cited. He begins by claiming 40mg is not a lot by comparing it to eating 100g of soybeans. This is like saying meat is detrimental to health because if you eat 100g of raw uncooked meat, you will probably get food poisoning. Nobody eats soybeans raw. They are processed, mixed, and cooked. His next contention is that the study is irrelevant because the people in the study are not that young. Maybe that’s because the relevant cells aren't actually that different in youth and adults. This has been supported by all the studies that have studied this - indeed, infants fed soy formula have CONSISTENTLY been PROVEN to have completely normal sexual maturation - see these three peer-reviewed studies proving the point [9] [10] [11]. You see, contrary to pro’s assertion, there IS actually scientific data for young boys, and it's all on my side yet again. Furthermore, it is not true that "children are more susceptible to the effects of isoflavone binding than adults", as pro claims. The source he cites for this is merely a study proving soy isoflavones can find their way into breast milk. That's different from establishing susceptibility to their effects. In fact, plenty of very strong research shows healthy children are far LESS susceptible to the effects of soy compared to healthy adults as they excrete more of the SERMs [7]. CorrelationsPro agrees that soy consumption is not correlated with the fertility rate. Instead he's now claiming that it is linked to individual fertility and that people are simply having sex more. Asia completely disproves this hypothesis, because Asians have the least sex out of everybody [12], so "having sex more" can't be how they keep their fertility up. Despite media reports about researchers using methods from the 30s, modern science proves that despite the increased prevalence of soy, if anything, total sperm numbers have actually INCREASED since the mid-70s [14]. Semen quality has also not changed at all [15]. Oh, and that study "showing" Asians have lower quality sperm? That's exactly the same as the study that pro provided that Guardian article on earlier, which I debunked above. But I guess the whole point is - if it doesn't affect your ability to have kids - AT ALL - then how exactly is it detrimental? It obviously has no net impact at all in all the meaningful correlations pro points out. Increasing estrogen does not mean T-levels necessary reduce, so that's not actually a correlation either. ConclusionPro has conceded most of my points about phytoestrogen, and completely flip-flopped on what phytoestrogen does. I still am monopolising the actual science in this debate, and pro is yet to even find a meaningful correlation. I think the evidence on soy is pretty clear here. Good luck to pro for the final round. Sources1 - . http://goo.gl...2 - . http://sn.im...3 - . http://sn.im...4 - . http://www.livestrong.com...5 - . http://www.health.harvard.edu...6 - . http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org...7 - . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...8 - . http://www.soyfoods.org...9 - . http://intl.jacn.org...10- . http://jama.jamanetwork.com...11- . http://www.degruyter.com...12- . http://marriage.about.com...13- . http://www.sciencedirect.com...14- . http://humrep.oxfordjournals.org...15- . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...