LOS ANGELES, January 22: A Soy drink a day might keep the doctor away. So say US scientists and nutritionists studying the potential of soy to lower the risks of cancer, heart disease and osteoporosis and diminish the hot flashes of menopause.They have focused on estrogen-like components of soy protein called isoflavones that appear to somehow protect health.
``I don't know of any food that brings so much to the table as soy foods,'' said James Anderson of the University of Kentucky, a leading nutrition researcher.
The problem with telling people to eat more soy is that food labels don't tell how much isoflavones are in the product, he said.
The $ 50,000-symposium on Tuesday was underwritten by protein technologies international of St Louis, a Dupont subsidiary that makes soy protein.Soybeans have long been a staple of Asian diets and may be responsible for lower cancer rates in that region. Though they have been cultivated in the United States since 1829, they caught on more as cattle feed than as
something for the dinner table. ``We're beginning to see the rationale for how soy has an effect in cancer, heart disease, and potentially the bone and brain,'' said Stephen Barnes, a pharmacology and toxicology professor from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Like raloxifene, a designer estrogen that builds bone in menopausal women without promoting breast cancer, soy isoflavones act selectively. Barnes said there is no evidence that they promote cancers stimulated by estrogen.Thomas Clarkson, a professor in the Department of Comparative Medicine at Wake Forest University, is interested in how soy isoflavones mimic the estradiol form of estrogen. Marketed as premarin, it alleviates the hot flashes, osteoporosis and heart disease.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
