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Comment by johnnyApplePRNG | Hacker News Reader

I listened to a great CBC-produced story on all of the "propaganda" surrounding soybeans back in the 90s... there were stories floating around that it raised estrogen levels in men and made you grow man-boobs basically if you ate it. I remember my friends joking about it at the time.

CBC wrote it off as completely without basis, said the chinese had been subsisting off of them for thousands of years, if they are fine eating it so should we be etc...

It was a convincing argument... but then again Canada grows a huge amount of soybeans and CBC is always pro-government so what to believe?

Perhaps there was some truth to the rumour?

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Probably, I know I distrust most of the food "science".

When I stuck to "food" pyramid, I was the most unhealthy, overweight, and unhappy I've ever been. When I basically switched to high fat, high protein, and lowish carbs,I got healthier and more importantly my hormone profile went back to normal and I wasn't depressed anymore.

It's astounding what lies the government pushes around food, and how damaging it can be to your life!

The thing with food science is that not every human is the same and people react differently to different things. Some people may thrive on a high fat diet, other might tolerate or even need more carbs, it really depends and isn't black and white. Thats why it's important to look at the sample size of studies among other factors.

Is there some evidence that humans really react that differently all else being equal?

Literally anything that can affect our bodies might be a confounding factor: sleep; water intake; type, frequency, duration, and difficulty of exercise; sunlight exposure; climate (average temperature, humidity, temperature swings, atmospheric salinity); elevation; latitude, etc...

Celiac, lactose intolerance, fructose malabsorption, migraines... there are plenty of variations that cause people to handle foods differently.

If you think something about those reports was fishy, you can go and look up how long the Chinese had been subsisting off of them and if they've had any problems. Any possible CBC bias would have zero effect on that.

This is all hypothetical, since we don't have access to the actual report referenced by the GP. However, it would be up to the CBC to support any such claim, not up to the rest of us to validate it.

You could verify that the extant Chinese population does not have trouble with estrogen and soybeans. However, thousands of years is long enough for evolution to work on soybean eating populations, so I'm not convinced that would be a meaningful claim in the first place. Best case scenario, you'd find some metric for measuring historical estrogen levels in Chinese men and look as far back as possible.

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