Soy Milk and Prostate Cancer

If you have always wondered whether soy consumption could help prevent prostate cancer or what soy milk has to do with prostate cancer, this article provides very helpful answers.

Speaking scientifically, there is a lot of evidence available from various epidemiological studies that lend support to the protective roles of certain foods in the human body against various forms of cancer. Specifically, certain dietary interventions such as selenium, vitamin E, lycopene, and soy foods, have been shown to be effective in reducing prostate cancer incidence in men that are at higher risk of the disease.

You can understand now that the release of such findings might be a long time coming, considering that even doing the studies often takes years to accomplish. However, it is currently believed that high plasma levels of Vitamin D has a protective effect on the patient or subject, and estrogens (phytoestrogens) extracted from fermented soybeans and other plant sources help to prevent prostate cancer.

Soy, soybean, or soya bean is an annual leguminous plant with seeds, grown as a row crop in the United States, and rich in polyunsaturated fats. These polyunsaturated fatty components to the soy are considered by many in the medical line of work to be more healthful than saturated fats. And especially in a nation like Japan, the soy protein, a dietary component that seems to influence prostate cancer by inhibiting the growth of the melanoma, is consumed in abundance.

In more detail, soy can be considered to be a kind of hormonal therapy for prostate cancer because it reduces the amount of testosterone that is circulating in the blood of the patients, and it also inhibits an enzyme in the body that converts testosterone into its more potent form in the prostate cells of the male reproductive system. Since prostate cancer cells depend in huge way on the hormones secreted by the endocrine system of the patient, thus lowering the amount of testosterone in the blood, Soy starves the sarcomas of the fuel that they need to grow.

However, hormonal therapy is only most helpful for early stage prostate cancer, in which its use is even limited. If the cancer cells have not in any form started to migrate from the prostate, they can be arrested by the absence of the critical testosterone to some degree, thereby caused to die or shrink and be removed by surgical intervention or irradiated by hormone treatment. The fear is that if the cancer does not go into complete remission soon enough, after a year or two, the melanoma could become resistant to the hormone remedy and commence its growth.

Advanced prostate cancer is considered to be hormone refractory in nature, suggesting that it is highly resistant to hormone treatments. The approach may still be considered to slow the progression of the disease, but not in any huge capacity. Other techniques like radiation and surgery, immunotherapy and chemotherapy may yield more reliable results, and soy products may have no place. Nonetheless, since the substance is healthy, you may very well still indulge while all the other cures are being effected.

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