hormones

Soy: Playing with poisons
03/02/2011 - 20:57

Earlier on Twitter I circulated an interesting recent paper a commenter pointed me to- Hypogonadism and erectile dysfunction associated with soy product consumption. The paper documents the case of a 19 year old who had type 1 diabetes, but no other health problems. After starting a vegan diet he experienced alarming erectile dysfunction and general loss of libido. Upon examination, low testosterone levels were found. When asked about his habits, he revealed that he had recently switched to a vegan diet: "This diet included a large amount of soy products equalling 360 mg of isoflavones per day. The diet consisted of soy milk, soy cookies (soy crisps), tofu, soy sauce, soy nuts, and soybeans (edamame)." He quit the vegan diet, but it took almost a year for his testosterone levels to normalize (and the normal line should be higher for a young man). 

It's funny because professional soy shill (he works for the Soy Board) and (not coincidentally) animal rights activist Mark Messinahas written many articles that male vegan friends of mine have showed me about how soy doesn't feminize men. He even published a review on it in which he concludes "Thus, men can feel confident that making soy a part of their diet will not compromise their virility or reproductive health." This despite the infancy of the science. For example, look at how long these studies are:

And how much soy? For whom? Are their genetic differences in processing isoflavones? Hmm. I can't say that soy is always an issue for men, but like any plant food, it can have powerful hormonal effects that people should be aware of. On the other side of the spectrum is a man who used phytoestrogens to improve his sperm quality and was able get his wife pregnant. 

One thing that struck me about the list of foods from the young man is that they are all the processed dreck that Messina and his Soy Board shills want to sell us. They are hyperpalatable and my experience with them is that they are very easy to overeat. I remember buying a box of Tofutti Cuties and eating them all in a single night...

I am not one of those folks who doesn't ever eat soy. I enjoy miso and soy sauce when I eat Japanese food. Like most traditional soy foods, they are very strong and it's hard to eat too much of them. When I was at ag school in Illinois, I had a class that was a series of seminars. One of them was a visit to the food science lab sponsored by the Soy Board. In that lab the lead scientist talked about how they were removing (or overpowering) the natural bitter flavors in soy to make tastier soy foods! Hmm. That bitter taste is what keeps us from eating too much plant poison. I feel bad for vegans who care more about their health than about soy farmers, because the reality is that you CAN do a vegan diet with reasonable levels of soy or no soy at all.  

In other news, my spell checker wants to correct edamame into "damned." 

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Hormones in beef, a thought
01/03/2011 - 14:04

Don at Primal Wisdom recently had a post on hormone levels in beef, which was really about whether or not hormone-treated factory farmed meat is unsafe*, but I was more interested in hormone levels in general.

I once had a native African explain to me that among her people, they have a taboo against hunting female animals. This taboo makes a lot of sense for a tribe dependent on hunting. If you kill a female, you are eliminating a bunch of potential offspring at the same time; while killing a few bulls will have essentially no effect on the fecundity of the herd.

So hunters would have preferred eating bulls to cows, and in Europe still today some producers raise bulls. Similarly, in the U.S. we get most of our beef from steer—neutered bulls—while we save the cows for calving and milk production.

Bulls and steer differ hormonally. Bull meat samples tested by Fritsche and Steinhart [1] contained medians of 0.34 mg/kg testosterone and 0.32 mg/kg epitestosterone, while steer meat samples (from unsupplemented steers) contain medians of 0.01 mg/kg testosterone and 0.12 mg/kg epitestosterone. Bull meat had up to 1.05 mg/kg testosterone. Thus, bull meat contains a median of 34 times more testosterone and more than twice as much epitestosterone than steer meat; and bull meat might have up to 105 times as much testosterone as a steer.

I've also read about these taboos. A long time ago I took a class on African agricultural economics and did a paper on how food taboos protected resources. Many cultures have taboos against killing young, lactating, pregnant, or female animals. It makes sense.

But maybe our beef these days doesn't have enough testosterone because we are consuming steers rather than virile males? As Tim Ferriss says in Four Hour Body "The sperm counts of men in the United States and 20 other industrialized countries have been falling since 1942 at a rate of roughly 1% per year in healthy males."

As an aside, many cultures have male virility rituals which involved the ingestion of animal penises and testicles or human seminal fluid. 

It's an interesting thought I'll just throw out there, which came to mind when Ulla Kjarval tweeted me that she thought us paleos would be most interested in her father's bull meat for sale. Her father, Ingimundur Kjarval, has a grass-based farm and blogs at healthymeat.org. If you are in or near NYC you can vote for Meatshare to buy it.

* I think we don't know and even if wild animals have high hormone levels, animals treated with the synthetic stuff still might be different. I prefer to take the precautionary approach. And there are other reasons not to eat factory farmed beef, though I think it's a better choice that factory chicken or pork because it spends some time on grass.

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Hug The Monkey
01/09/2010 - 19:27

 

http://www.hugthemonkey.com/
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