October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and the soy industry will take the opportunity to feed women’s fears and urge us to consume soy products for breast cancer prevention. Soy milk manufacturers may even give away soy milk in bright pink containers—called “Pinkies”—to women attending Komen Races for the Cure.
Sadly, soy is not only useless for cancer prevention but can cause, contribute to and accelerate the growth of breast cancer. The Israeli Health Ministry, French Food Agency, German Institute of Risk Assessment and Cornell University’s Center for Breast Cancer and Environmental Risk Factors have all warned women to “exercise caution” regarding soy consumption, particularly if they’ve been diagnosed with, or have a family history of, breast cancer.
Further warnings come in the book Breast Cancer Boot Camp (Tate, 2013) by William B. Hobbins, MD and Wendy Sellens, LAc. More than a hundred thermogram images provide striking visual evidence that soy and other estrogenic foods and herbs promote vascularization and angiogenesis in the breast. The word “angiogenesis” comes from the Greek words angio, meaning “blood,” and genesis, meaning “formation of.” The term was coined back in 1935 to describe the new blood vessels forming in the placenta during pregnancy. It now commonly refers to the formation of new blood vessels during any bodily growth spurt, from the replacement of blood vessels after an injury to the ability of malignant tissues to rapidly form the network of blood vessels needed for the runaway growth of breast cancer.
Dr. Hobbins is a former surgeon who pioneered breast cancer detection through mammography and thermography. Now age ninety, he continues to urge widespread use of thermography for initial screening and prevention because “the angiogenesis of a breast cancer is not only the earliest sign, but the greatest sign for detection and prognosis in treatment.” Back in the 1980s when soy was first widely marketed as a “health food,” Dr. Hobbins noted a link between soy consumption, increased vascularity and breast cancer development.
Sellens is a licensed acupuncturist and a protégé of Dr. Hobbins who studied with him for five years and spent seven years reviewing his thousands of cases. She founded Pink Image Thermography in Solana Beach, California, is president and cofounder of the Women’s Academy of Breast Thermography, president of the non-profit Pink Bow Breast Thermography research and education, and is actively pushing for rigorous nationwide certification standards for thermography.
Healthy breasts. Normal thermogram. Vascularization in the breasts of a
Non-vascular woman consuming large amounts of soy.
Thermography is an imaging technique that can detect abnormalities based on patterns of body heat. Because cell proliferation rarely develops without a vascular process that increases the surface temperature, thermography can identify women at risk for breast cancer or who have breast cancer in a very early stage. In color thermograms, the cooler areas appear dark blue, purple and black, while the warmer areas are yellow, orange, red and white. Gray scale thermographs show hotter areas as white and cooler areas as black. For highest diagnostic accuracy, Hobbins and Sellens recommend both types of thermograms be done.
Many alternative health professionals today recommend thermography as a safe screening alternative to mammography, which is not only painful and expensive but can increase breast cancer risk through radiation exposure and breast tissue compression. Thermograms are particularly helpful for the screening of women with young, dense breast tissue, and those with fibrocystic breast disease, breast implants or scars. Unlike mammograms, thermograms are useful for detecting changes in the armpit area. Thermography is also safe for women who are pregnant or lactating.
With its hundreds of “before and after” examples, Breast Cancer Boot Camp shows how women can use thermograms to monitor their breast health and see whether estrogenic foods and herbs live up to their marketing promise. As Sellens puts it, “Your breasts can’t lie” and “thermograms can be your new breast friend.” If soy were “healthy” for the breasts, we could expect women who regularly consume it to have non-vascular breasts, which would be evidence of a lack of stimulation and a protective effect. Having analyzed thousands of thermograms, Sellens reports, “This is just not the case.”
The authors show similar unwanted estrogenic effects from flax, black cohosh, red clover, and other phytoestrogen-rich foods and herbs, supplements such as DIM and calcium glucarate that allegedly regulate estrogen metabolism— and even bio-identical hormone replacement therapies. Given that many naturopathic doctors and alternative health care practitioners regularly recommend these products, this is a sobering reminder to us all that “natural” is not necessarily “safe.”
SIDEBAR
NEW 3D MAMMOGRAMS: NOT SUCH A GOOD IDEA
With more and more women questioning the wisdom of mammograms, the industry had to come up with something “new and improved.” After all, routine mammograms are huge moneymakers, which also shunt women into the breast cancer business. They often give false positives and sometimes miss tumors but the most serious problem with mammograms is that they can cause breast cancer! Mammograms expose the breasts to radiation while simultaneously compressing the breast tissue—often quite painfully—which can cause cancer cells to spread. One study indicates that mammograms cause about twenty to twenty-five cases out of one hundred thousand of fatal breast cancer per year.
The new mammogram is called 3D tomosynthesis, which is basically a CT scan for your breasts. The 3D mammogram requires multiple views in order to achieve three dimensionality. That means you are getting a lot more radiation exposure, by some estimates three times as much. And the 3D mammogram is only done after the 2D mammogram has been carried out.
By the way, more and more children today are subjected to CT scans—the average American child gets seven radiation scans by the age of eighteen. One CT scan exposes your child to between one hundred and five hundred times more ionizing radiation than a standard x-ray. Radiation-induced cancers include leukemia and cancers of the brain, lungs, thyroid and colon.
Source: mercola.com, August 27, 2013
This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Fall 2014
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Awesome article! I am happy to say “no more soy” for me. But for so many women it is a big part of their diet. I will be sharing your message on my social media.
Great article, Kaayla.
Some things I wonder about – In Okinawa, Japan they eat a lot of soy (I think you previously reported 2 oz./day, which is 50 lbs. a year of soy). They have low breast cancer rate, why would that be so?
Also, wouldn’t vegetarian women who rely on soy as their primary protein source have an extremely high incidence of breast cancer? Are there any studies that show this?
What about the quality of the soy? If a woman eats organic tofu, is she at the same risk as a woman who eats junk food forms of soy?
In Japan there are people who eat soy, however they don´t eat plenty of it and they don´t eat it as main menu. They consume soy with other food, which works “against” it. They eat long-time-fermented soy only. They don´t use soy as “meat”, “milk”, “sausages” etc. like vegans in USA or Europe.
Hey, I am considering undergoing breast augmentation surgery. My problem is about going over muscle as I am always active meaning that I do crossfit. Does anybody have any ideas? I am still to see the the doctor as I’m still unsure re the procedure. Thankyou
I have the same question. Can someone answer please?
This was a helpful article. I recently searched up what foods would help my breasts grow bigger naturally, and one of the first things mentioned was soy. I am so grateful for this article!