Soy's health benefits debated

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Determining the value of eating soy products to improve your health is a tricky thing.

In late May, a study reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition concluded that menopausal women didn't decrease their high blood pressure, as had been expected, by taking soy supplements.

However, a study published in the same publication a month later, on Chinese and American breast cancer survivors, found that women whose daily diets provided 10 milligrams or more of soy isoflavones had a 25 per cent lower chance of a recurrence of breast cancer. The second study was conducted on more than 9,000 breast cancer survivors. The first study was only on 24 menopausal women over six weeks.

The Globe and Mail reported that scientist Sam Wong of the Yalor College of Medicine in Houston pointed out that, while intravenous infusions of soy isoflavones help blood vessels to dilate, "we don't take soy by infusion." BF