One of the favorite little games that drug companies and food companies play when they are sponsoring or paying for studies is to use what they call surrogate endpoints.
So here’s an example of a surrogate endpoint. Let’s say that we invent a new drug that cures cancer, let’s say that it kills people, 100% of the people taking it.
It kills them before cancer kills them. Well, in that case, our surrogate endpoint can be cancer and we simply ignore the fact that it kills people.
They play this game all the time.
Every blood pressure medication, every diabetes medication, and most other medications are tested with surrogate endpoints rather than with what is a better test, which is all-cause mortality.
How many people who take this diabetes drug live longer? How many people who take this blood pressure drug live longer?
So this game also happens to be played by what I call big agriculture.
Especially with the darling of big agriculture, which is soy. In much of the world, they call soy soya, and it’s the same thing
In this study, they basically found that soy lowers your testosterone 20%
Now that’s not a good thing, is it?
Well, it is if you’re a big agriculture company or a big drug company.
Because you simply look for surrogate endpoints that you can show off, that look better to a doctor anyway, then “lowers testosterone 20%”.
And they found a set of surrogate endpoints to trumpet. They called this one “markers of oxidative stress in men”
You may not find these markers lying around anywhere, and nobody really cares about them, and I can’t really say I understand them.
But two out of three of these markers are improved when men eat soy products. Or so they say. They found something good about soy consumption.
Note they did not find that soy lowers cholesterol…
But the soy products lowered men’s testosterone about 20% That’s a fact that we all understand.
I think that I would never eat soy milk, soy flour, soybeans, or any soy product other than the perhaps occasional use of tempeh or soy sauce.
Soy sauce and tempeh are fermented soy, and the compounds in them that lower testosterone are largely absent in those products.
Citations
Dietary supplements of soya flour lower serum testosterone concentrations and improve markers of oxidative stress in men
http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v57/n1/full/1601495a.html
Click for more information on Dietary supplements of soya, for Men’s Health information, or for information about Testosterone Levels.