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Comment by newen | Hacker News Reader

This is like saying both water and botulinum are technically toxins, so it’s okay to drink liters of botulinum a day.

What matters is the quantity of phytoestrogens in foods, and soy products happens to have significantly higher phytoestrogens than other foods.

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I am not making a two wrongs make a right argument. I argue that grains are pervasive in our society and have no noticable ill effects. You strawmanned by claiming soy has way higher phytoestrogens than other foods. It's not true. It is just more studied due to its increasing popularity. Lignan forms of phytoestrogens are in potent concentrations in common cereal grains.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24284429_Phytoestro...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5302234/

From the first link's abstract:

> Phytoestrogens were detected in all foods analyzed; bread contained the highest amount of phytoestrogens-many as isoflavones-with an average content of 375 +/- 67 microg/100 g wet weight (excluding soya-linseed bread with 12,000 microg/100 g).

This is what I'm saying. You are comparing 375 and 12,000 and saying the difference doesn't matter. It's a two orders of magnitude difference.

So no, what you're saying is not true. Soy products have significantly higher levels of phytoestrogens than other foods.

I stand corrected. This source also confirms your observations.

http://www.pkdiet.com/pdf/pld/phytoestrogen.pdf

Thank you for enlightening me.

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