A Really Good Reason For Not Eating Tofu

I have been aided in avoiding tofu by the confusion over whether eating soy contributes to breast cancer growth. I really hate tofu. My mother fed it to us as children and I didn't like it then and I don't like it now. I might eat a little bit in my hot and sour soup but I will never order a dish which is tofu based.

But now (finally) we have clarification on the soy or no soy for women with breast cancer:

The issue is eating soy products seems to give women protection from breast cancer. Asian countries where soy products are eaten regularly have much lower rates of breast cancer than the US. But the estrogen-similar stuff in soy products has been thought to contribute to breast cancer growth, especially with hormone sensitive breast cancer.

So the truth was found in some recent research using rats:

"The researchers found that rats that were given soybean isoflavones to eat throughout their lives — in particular, one type of soybean isoflavone called genistein — had improved immunity against cancer. But rats that weren't given the isoflavone until after developing breast cancer didn't have that same immune response to kill cancer cells. Instead, these rats had higher rates of cancer growth and higher rates of recurrence after their tumors were removed."

And more:

"All of the rats were then treated with tamoxifen to kill the cancer. The researchers found that the rats raised on genistein had only a 7 percent chance of breast cancer recurrence after tamoxifen treatment, but the rats that were recently given genistein had a 33 percent recurrence rate."

So if you eat soy all your life, your risk of cancer should be lower and remain lower for recurrence. But if you are diagnosed with breast cancer, don't start eating soy. 

See now I really have a good reason for not eating tofu.

Its clearly a conspiracy

Estrogen - good, bad, maybe, maybe not. Soy, yes, no, maybe, maybe not. Once you have had breast cancer, you need to be careful about estrogen and soy (which has some estrogen) and every time you turn around, they try to confuse you some more.

Here is the latest article which says estrogen may protect some people from breast cancer. Routinely women used to be given hormone replacement therapy, which included estrogen and progesterone, to relieve menopause symptoms. Then it was determined that HRT actually raised the risk of breast cancer. Once it stopped being prescribed, breast cancer rates started dropping.

A breast cancer diagnosis also provides information for the patient and doctor if your cancer is Estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR), and Her2 positive or negative. If you are ER and PR positive, you should benefit from chemo. If you are Her2 positive, you can also be treated with Herceptin.

However if you are ER positive, you need to avoid soy (until another study comes out to tell us differently) and estrogen as the current belief is that an ER positive cancer will feed off the estrogen in soy or in medical treatments.

If this isn't confusing enough, then they change their minds and a new study comes along and say the opposite. So clearly its a conspiracy to keep us all confused.

I have ER positive, PR positive, and Her2 negative breast cancer. I hate tofu and because of this confusion I can use it as an excuse not to eat it. I do eat somethings that have tofu in them - like Hot & Sour soup which I eat a few times a year. But now I can skip tofu as a rule.

So you may call me confused but I don't have to eat tofu.