elfs | The Devil's Food!

Yes, it's true! Soybeans are turning our children into homosexuals!

I just... I can't think of anything to say to that. It's so unbelievably stupid, I don't know where to begin.

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From:

http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/

And to the people upthread who've already commented, the plural of antecdote is not data, and posting your own antecdotes is pointless. Ding! Score one for science. A data set of 1 point does not make a trend.

Nor, for that matter, is correlation==causation.

And for the crack about Asian and soy, likewise pointless.

J…ein. Here, I have to disagree. Just how rapidly do human populations evolve new genes, anyway? Soybeans, as we know them today, cannot be older than agriculture itself. (Ditto corn and bananas, but that's beside the point.) So, no older than 5000-6000 years. (My guess is that soy is more recent, like only 3 millennia old, but I need confirmation.) On the other paw, how long ago did humans domesticate cows, sheep, or goats? 10,000? 50,000?

I'm leery of the whole, "Soy is teh eeevil and will make your pen0rz fall off," argument.

OTOH, I have to agree that too much soy-anything probably isn't good for you. Too much of anything isn't good for you. (Even water, drunk in sufficient quantities, will screw up your body.)
Consider that soy couldn't be more than 20%-30% of a traditional Asian diet (which, IIRC, was 70% rice). So, making soy and soy-based products the majority of what you eat is novel, and invalidates the, "but Asians eat soy!" argument.

Then there's another question: is the soybean we're eating and processing today the same as the one that Asians have been eating for millennia? Industrial food may be the real culprit here.

And note: while you can't compute statistics from a single point, you
can use it as a counterexample. And I have to wonder if you and the others are coming from orthogonal directions. They may just be providing counterexamples to perceived absolute statements, whereas you appear to be discussing matters of degree.