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Under the phytoestrogen shadow

You’re buying supplies for your little one………………. nappies, “bum” cream, formula.

Formula ?

Most Mom’s introduce it, sooner or later.

Manufacturer’s encourage it’s purchase, toting all the extra goodies it contains. It’s almost a non-brainer, you want to provide your little one with the best nutritional start possible.

BUT……….

Inside many tins of formula, there lurks a vixen. One that is seldom mentioned, or when she is, she is frequently painted as an asset, a protector, but, this picture is not entirely accurate.

Who is this “foxy” lady ?

Soy-based formulas, come loaded with isoflavones, they go by the names of daidzein and genistein. These exotic plant ladies, belong to a class of compounds known as the phytoestrogens.

They’re biologically active.

This means, when they’re consumed, they change human physiology.

In the case of phyto-estrogens, they’re mimicking the great lady hormone, estrogen, who plays a critical role in a lady’s physiology, controlling her curves, her moods, her health.

Estrogen is a grown-up hormone, her arrival marks the commencement puberty.

Growing up in excess

Feeding your little one a soy-based formula on a routine basis, is exposing your little one to 13 000 to 22 000 times, more “estrogen”, than Mother Nature intended.

This is what a group of researchers from the Clinical Mass Spectrometry Center in Cincinnati, discovered nearly 20 years ago, when they tested the blood samples from babies, being fed, soy-based formula.

In search of the vixen

The researchers began their study, with a shopping spree for formula.

They selected four tins of soy-based formula and took them back to the lab, to quantify how much phytoestrogen each tin contained. All contained, substantial amounts of phytoestrogens. There were differences between the brands, isoflavone levels ranged from 32-47 mg/L.

These differences, reflect the slight differences in the processing of the product by the different manufacturers, as well as the source of the soy beans. The reason a plant produces isoflavones and things, in the first place, is to protect itself from “bad” guys. Exactly how much of a particular chemical is produced, depends on the conditions the plant is growing in.

Adding it up

So…………………… a 4 month old infant, probably consumes somewhere between 800 and 1000 ml of formula a day, which means baby is consuming 35-50 mg of isoflavones per day.

Babies are pretty small. To factor this into the equation, the researchers calculated approximately how much a baby would be consuming, based on body weight.

This comes to……

6.9 mg/kg body weight/ day

It doesn’t look like much……….. so what is the fuss about ?

Traditional diets contain

The idea that phytoestrogens have health benefits, is based on the observation that the cultures that eat soy-based foods, have better health, particularly lower risks of breast cancer.

Japanese ladies, following a traditional diet, eat around 8-11 g, to get these health benefits.

A 4 month old, being fed a soy-based formula is actually consuming around 56 g of the stuff a day.

Eish !

That is 5-10 times more.

But, what goes in, doesn’t always GO IN….

How much is inside baby

This is pharmacology 101, just because you eat a chemical, does not always mean, the chemical ends up inside of your body. Our body’s come with a very sophisticated chemical clearing house, some chemicals get in, some………………. just pass straight through.

So, the team decided to LOOK a little deeper.   A bold move, because, few Moms or ethics committees, will allow perfectly healthy babies to be subject to multiple blood draws. OUCH ! Lucky for us, a few Moms agreed to allow researchers to draw a single blood sample…..

The testing revealed.

• Breast fed infants had blood levels of 4.7 ±3 mg/L
• Infants fed cow-milk based formula had blood levels of 9.3 ±2 mg/L
• Infants fed soy-based formula had blood levels of 552-1775 mg/L. The average was 980mg/L.

That is an ASTRONOMICAL amount.

Levels in adults, are typically 40-240 mg/L, after a soy-based meal, which only happens, every now and again, not at every feeding.

That’s more than expected

The levels of the chemicals were a little higher than anticipated…..

This is not totally unexpected, that sophisticated detoxification system I mentioned earlier, is still coming on line, so baby’s often metabolize chemicals, a little differently from adults.

This data suggests babies are not as efficient at processing the isoflavones that they consume, as adults.

Bottom line….

A baby being fed soy-based formula is being exposed to 13 000 – 22 000 times more “estrogen” than normal, at a time when the brain and body is still developing. New one

The dose makes the poison

Phytoestrogens might come from plants, but they are still estrogens.

You don’t have to be a biology whizz to be get that exposing baby to excessively high levels “estrogen”, at a time when estrogen levels are not meant to be high, is probably not a health move.

So err on the side of caution.

If you’re using formula, make sure it is not a soy-based product.

Further reading

 

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