Soy and Homosexuality??

On World Net Daily, Jim Rutz, a religious commentator, posted a six-part column about how eating soy is "severely damaging our children and threatening to tear apart our culture." How is soy doing this? By "making kids 'gay'." After stating clearly that he is "not biased" so that we know that he isn't "anti-health food," Rutz goes on to state that soy contains estrogens, which can "suppress masculinity," stimulating the "female-side" of a boy's physicality and mentality. He goes on to state many of the adverse side-affects of the estrogen-containing soy bean and warns parents of feeding their children these products. After reading the first part of this article, and noting that most of his sources were from editorials and the such, I decided to research this a little more.

Mindy S. Kurzer (Dept of Food Science and Nutrition, University of Michigan) compiled thirty-nine studies concerning men and premenopausal women and soy intake and published a research paper on their findings. She found that no study that she worked on really came to a conclusion that regular soy intake had much effect on the hormones of either men or premenopausal women. It is evident that more work needs to be done, but there is not any conclusive information to supply Mr. Rutz with his "knowledge" of soy and increased estrogen levels. This study was compiled in 2000, so I'm sure more work has been done. Kurzer's article mentions that some work has shown that soy can decrease the risk of prostate cancer, and may have an effect on the level of testosterone, but there is no reason yet to keep your child from consuming soy products in fear for his masculinity.

http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53327

http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/reprint/132/3/570S