recycled dumbassery

Who can resist the ridiculousness of a headline like this:

A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals

After that headline, the article delivers on its promise of bullshit:

Unfortunately, when you eat or drink a lot of soy stuff, you're also getting substantial quantities of estrogens.

Estrogens are female hormones. If you're a woman, you're flooding your system with a substance it can't handle in surplus. If you're a man, you're suppressing your masculinity and stimulating your "female side," physically and mentally.

Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That's why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today's rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products.[...]

He adds in all sorts of "scary" information that begins with "studies show" or "research says" in the article but offers no citations on any of it. The person who penned this tripe, Jim Rutz, is not any sort of medical professional of course. He is chairman of Megashift Ministries and founder-chairman of Open Church Ministries and an author of a couple religious books. He should really consider joining the circus as a contortionist, what with that amazing ability to pull stuff out of his ass.

This is also not "news". This is, at best, recycled wingnut controversy. I clearly remember this very topic being discussed/debated on the parenting bulletin board I was a part of when our first son was a baby in 2000. As far as I know, there are no conclusive medical research studies showing a link between soy isoflavones and homosexuality.

However, there is this bit in an article from 2001 in a newsletter at UC Davis (which describes itself a "A research-based newsletter prepared by the University of California for professionals interested in maternal and infant nutrition"):

A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports data from one of the largest controlled studies to examine long-term effects of soy formula during infancy. This retrospective study relied on a group of adults, ages 20-34 years, who participated as infants in randomized feeding trials conducted by the University of Iowa. All individuals in the study had been exclusively formula-fed, with either a cow-based or soy-based formula for the first 4 months of life. Of the original 952 in the infant studies, the researchers were able to locate and interview 811 (396 females, 415 males). [...] With a subsample of 81 subjects, the researchers were able to determine that self-reported outcomes matched with actual medical records at least 70% of the time. For most of the 30 outcomes examined, no statistically significant differences were found. [...] The authors calculated that the sample size should be large enough to test for the primary outcomes-i.e., effects of soy during infancy on variables related to body size, pubertal development, and menstruation. Other possible outcomes, such as homosexual orientation, testicular cancer, and hormone disorders, were also examined, and no effects were found. [...]

JAMA is by subscription (which I don't have), so I couldn't get o the original study. This isn't just an Amercian thing either, as the Great Gay Soy Devil has caused concern worldwide. From a 2003 article on GayNZ.com:

Now there's a powder keg. Soy - miracle health food or gay-making cocktail? Well, if there's some "fascinating" scientific research about, surely Sanitarium, one of Australasia's leading health food companies, would know something about it.

Problem is, they don't. There is no evidence to suggest that soy milk can make men gay, Sanitarium New Zealand's nutrition manager Kim Stirling told GayNZ.com.

She also expressed bewilderment as to where Wishart had sourced this material, as inquiries she sent out to several leading independent researchers overseas in the field of soy failed to turn up any evidence or research on the subject - not even crap research done by a high school student in the back of a van - nothing.

A search by GayNZ.com for information on the internet, usually a teeming repository for bizarre claims, yielded few hits. Although there are various organisations concerned about the alleged side-effects of soy consumption, gayness doesn't appear to be amongst them. The few obscure sources returned in our search that did seemed to put connections between soy products and homosexuality in the area of urban legend.

Infact, it seems Jim Rutz got all his info from this site: http://www.senselessplanet.com/soyhomo.htm which begins with a guy who claims the soy industry is out to poison us all and also makes the jump from a study on soy and prostate cancer to 'Male children fed soy formulas and soy products may not ever get to like girls' and ends with some fantasy play called "SOSOGAY". Pathetic but unsurprsing.



(one non-fat, soy cross-post, please)