The Deal with Soy, part 2
Phytoestrogen and BPH

As a man, the last thing you would think that you want is estrogen. As the poster-child female hormone, estrogen is more commonly-known as an ingredient in birth control pills or else as a controversial treatment for menopause. With this in mind, I'd like to take a moment to clear up this misconception before moving on to talk about the health benefits of soy.

First of all, let's remember that hormones exist in a balance within the body. Everyone, men and women, has some estrogen and some testosterone. It's not that men have testosterone and women have estrogen. Rather, the way that hormones work is according to a relative balance between different hormones. So, for example, men have more testosterone than estrogen and women have the reverse proportion. The proportion of one to the other is what allows hormones to do their work in the body.

Now, several years ago, researchers discovered that estrogen has a beneficial effect on the symptoms of BPH. The reason for this appears to be that estrogen stops the conversion of testosterone into a chemical called dihydrotestosterone. Within the prostate, an enzyme called 5-alpha reductase transforms testosterone into dihydrotestosterone, which then stimulates the growth of the prostate. Of course, prostate growth is what causes BPH. Now, I don't want to overload the scientific jargon here, but the point is that estrogen appears to interfere with this process, and therefore to stop BPH.

In their experiments, researchers tried both pharmaceutical (synthetic human) estrogen and phytoestrogen (plant estrogen). Men getting the pharmaceutical estrogen saw an improvement in their symptoms of BPH. Unfortunately, they also experienced impotence, loss of muscle mass, and a generally terrible feeling. However, when they got the phytoestrogen, the symptoms of BPH again improved, but this time there were no nasty side-effects.

Phytoestrogen is weaker than pharmaceutical estrogen, and hence has a more gentle effect in the body. Remember about the hormone balance. If you take pharmaceutical estrogen, then you will probably throw off your whole body's hormonal balance. This is why the first group of men felt terrible after they got their estrogen treatments. However, phytoestrogen does not so easily throw off the body's hormonal balance. Remember that hormones occur in very small amounts within the body and as a result it takes very little to upset the body's hormonal balance.

Examining societies where the rates of BPH are lower, such as Japan, supports this research. In Japan, soy plays a major role in the average diet and soy is a very good source of phytoestrogen. Looking at the rates of BPH, we can see that Japanese men see a much lower rate of BPH than American men, whose diet contains far less soy than the Japanese diet.

Understanding this, it seems that any man concerned about prostate health ought to consider adding some form of soy to his diet. There are many soy products (and no, soy sauce on your Chinese food won't do the job) on the market and many of them are actually quite tasty. The technology has improved over the past few years and it's not just tofu any more. However, probably even better is to look at a soy phytosterol complex or else a supplement containing a soy phytosterol complex. I've previously mentioned Provelex and it's worth mentioning it again now, since it contains a soy phytosterol complex as one of its key ingredients. There are many other products on the market, but I would tend to say that this is the most well-formulated and reputable one that I know.