Does soy cause cancer?

[dunbar]

@xbuckeye

I was taught in food school by people who studied soy=cancer first-hand. The current best guess is that Soy can make certain cancers (classified as estrogen-response tumors and usually reproductive in origin) worse and has no benefit on most other cancers. The only tentative benefit may be consumption of soy in larger amounts before puberty.

This is basically the inconclusive conclusion. Soy intake confers some benefit, but consumption needs to be regular and early in life. Just go to google scholar and put in soy, cancer. If you have institutional access you can read most of the articles.

The problem with all these types of questions is that the answers are essentially based on people’s recollection of what they ate months or years ago. How many servings of tofu did you have when you were 12? What’s a serving? Also, people don’t always know what they’re eating, foods interact with other foods in ways we don’t understand, etc. This is one of the main reasons that one week you read that pomegranate juice prevents cancer and the next week it causes diabetes. The smoking-lung cancer link was more complicated than most people think, but was much simpler than nutrition studies.

[constanze]

@dunbar

The problem with all these types of questions is that the answers are essentially based on people’s recollection of what they ate months or years ago. How many servings of tofu did you have when you were 12? What’s a serving?

Wouldn’t studies done in Japan and other countries, where people have eaten soya for quite some time, be helpful in determining that? Also, it should be possible then to compare the older generation, who ate soya and algae when growing up, with the youngest generation, that ate western food and meat when growing up (and who end up with many more problems in their 20s and 30s than the elders in their 80s, at least the heart-disease problems.)