WND: Soy Makes You Gay?

So sayeth some fella who publishes for WorldNetDaily.

To be honest, I don’t read WND, and would never have had my attention drawn to this if not for the round of derisive commentary from Waldo and Vivian. So I looked up some of the claims.

UK Guardian: Should we worry about soya in our food?

Sue Dibb, now food policy expert at the National Consumer Council, was a member of the CoT working group that compiled the final report. She questions whether infant soya milk should still be on public sale and is troubled by the latest marketing of soya. “We looked in detail at the claimed health benefits for adults for soya consumption and concluded there was not sufficient evidence to support many of them. There may be benefits but there are also risks. The groups of adults of particular concern are those with a thyroid problem and women with oestrogen-dependent breast cancer. It worries me that soya is being pushed as a health food by a big soya and supplements industry. We ought to be taking a more cautious approach.”

The Food Standards Agency advice is that soya’s potential to have an adverse effect on babies’ hormonal development is still controversial, but that soya formula should only be given to infants under 12 months old in exceptional circumstances.

Professor Richard Sharpe, head of the Medical Research Council’s human reproductive sciences unit at Edinburgh University, was also a member of the committee’s working group on phyto-oestrogens in food. He has been studying the decline in male fertility in the past half-century. He recently completed studies on the effects of soya milk on young male monkeys which showed that it interferes with testosterone levels. “In the first three months after birth, baby boys have a neonatal testosterone rise. The testes are very, very active in hormone production at this point and there is a lot of cell activity going on that will determine sperm count in adults and will affect the developing prostate. If you introduce a phyto-oestrogen, which can, in large amounts, alter these changes, you may predispose children to later disease. Soya formula milk is a [recent] western invention. There is not the historical evidence to show it is safe.

Now I’ll readily admit that WND has it’s share of craziness, but the UK Guardian?

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