alt Hacker News> and a lot of the fear mongering about endocrine effects of soy are just wrong
Farmed cow's milk contains enough oestrogens, progestogens, etc. that academics have argued (e.g. in the 00s) over the extent to which cow milk consumption affects human health. The macho crowd seem to think that it's implicitly obvious that the juice of a bean is more feminising than the mammary secretions of calved female mammals, from a lineage selectively bred to have massive udders. I don't understand this, but I do find it very funny. (From a distance. I like having teeth.)
That said, if there were a significant and obvious effect on humans from dairy (or substitutes), academics probably wouldn't have argued about it for so long.
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> The macho crowd seem to think that it's implicitly obvious that the juice of a bean is more feminising
I’m not sure that’s true. But they’ve heard that soy milk has phytoestrogens in it, and that Asians tend to be smaller than Americans. From there it’s just math: 1+1 = 11
The problem is not that milk is a mammary secretion. After all, boys and girls both drink mother’s milk!
The problem is dairy practices that keep cows pregnant for 9 months out of the year, every year, and milk them for 10-11 months out of the year, every year. !!
When you operate a dairy on a more natural rhythm you don’t get the elevated pregnancy hormones in the milk.
This is one of the reasons why goat milk is healthier, because they don’t do the same to goats.
Source: I’m a farmer