A recent news item on Israeli TV said that a number of children, boys
and girls alike, have become sexually mature at a very young age. The
youngest is a girl who began to menstruate at the age of two.

The culprit is tentatively believed to be the consumption of soy and
soy products.

Israeli, as I have mentioned, is the country whose per capita rate of
vegetarianism for religious reasons is second only to India. (Judaism
does not prescribe vegetarianism, as does Hinduism and other religions
indigenous to India, but because of the problems of kashrut in mass
farming and marketing many Israeli Jews choose not to eat meat. Some
Israelis choose not to eat meat for moral and/or reasons.)

We in Israel consume a great deal of soy products: roasted soy beans,
soy drink, tofu, tempe, meatless "burgers", "franks", "schnizel",
"ice-cream" and ground soy that resembles ground meat, to mention a
few, are all staples of the Israeli diet. Even non-vegetarians consume
these products regularly.

It has long been known that, because soy contains an entirely
naturally-occurring estrogen-like compound, middle-aged women can stave
off the unpleasant symptoms that accompany menopause by consuming about
a cup of soy beans or soy-based foods a day. The advantages to coping
with menopausal symptoms by consuming soy products are many: soy is
nutritious, soy does not cause uterine or breast cancer as does
synthetic hormone replacement therapy, neither does consuming soy cause
the menstrual period to begin again, as does hormone replacement
therapy. All this is well and good.

However, it may be that the hormone-like compounds in soy can cause
premature sexual maturity in children who eat large amounts of soy
products. This is highly undesirably for many reasons, not the least of
which is that growth is affected by the premature reaching of sexual
maturity.

Research is now being conducted to confirm, or disprove, the
preliminary findings and suspicions that soy is the culprit in these
cases.

[quote]
We created this site because we were tired
of being accused of shoplifting while we
spent hours reading labels trying to find
something to eat that was soy free.
[/quote]

Now THATS what I call a perfectly sound argument....