Early soy diet may protect against breast cancer

Asian-American women who ate a lot of soy as children had a 58 percent reduced risk of developing breast cancer. "Childhood soy intake was significantly associated with reduced breast cancer risk in our study," said Dr. Larissa Korde of the National Cancer Institute, whose study appears in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention. Historically, breast cancer rates among white women in the United States are four to seven times higher than in women in China or Japan. But when Asian women emigrate to the United States, their risk for breast cancer rises over several generations, suggesting something other than genetics was at play.

Researchers interviewed nearly 1,600 women of Chinese, Japanese and Filipino descent who were living in San Francisco, Oakland, or Los Angeles, California, or Hawaii. Some 600 had breast cancer and the rest were healthy. If the women had mothers living in the United States, they asked the mothers about their daughter's soy consumption in childhood. Women who consumed the highest amounts of soy in childhood had 58 percent less risk of breast cancer compared with those in the lowest groups.

Bonnie - this makes perfect sense because as I have said for the longest time, fermented soy products are staples of the diet of Far East women. When Asian women emigrate to the U.S., their diet becomes more Westernized, hence, a reduction in fermented soy consumption and the rise in breast cancer over generations.

I want to emphasize that soy milk and soy protein, which are staples in the U.S., do not have the same effect as do fermented soy products like tofu, tempeh, natto, miso, etc.