sundries

[rm]

- The stress from having to redo my diet again has just hit me in a somewhat bad and jittery way. It's much easier to adhere to a food restriction that causes instant suffering than one that may prevent me from getting cancer in two or three decades. I'm not going to throw out everything of mine in the house that is soy-based, but after it's gone, none of it will be repurchased. I am wondering if I need to worry about things that may have soy contamination, or if little quantities don't matter. As you might guess, lots of my gluten-free foods contain soy. No more chicken nuggets or buffalo sauce! I haven't checked the pizzas yet. I do get to keep the croisants and the brownies.

- I really need to stop getting into fights with chicks in my neighborhood. On the other hand, they really need to stop throwing bagels at me.

- I just accidently whapped myself right between the eyes with the headphones at work and am hoping it didn't bruise.

It's been a hard morning, kids.

Comments

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

Other people have already said the same thing, roughly, but I'm going to add to the chorus by asking whether you've spoken to an oncologist (your mother's or anyone else's) about this whole soy thing. If it weren't a problem for you to give it up I wouldn't think to question it, but given that you already have dietary restrictions that make this extremely awkward for you, it makes sense to be reasonably sure that there's a material benefit to doing it.

So I'm going to apologize now for going over information you undoubtedly already have, and plunge ahead and do it anyway.

Hormone-receptor-positive breast cancers are the norm in sporadic (that is to say, non-hereditary) cases, particularly those occurring post-menopause. So unless you've gone forward with genetic testing and now know otherwise, it isn't necessarily the case that your mother's tumor's hormone status says anything about your level of risk.

Yes, there's good reason to think that exposure to excessive hormone levels is associated with increased risk of hormone-receptor-positive tumors, but last I heard, it wasn't clear that soy created a significant additional level of risk (that is, one higher than you'd have from a lifetime of menstrual cycles, not interrupted routinely by pregnancy and lactation). It is notable that in Japan, breast cancer rates are much lower than in the U.S., and that's a population of women who're eating more soy than we are, not less.

And to top it all off? If you are concerned about excessive hormone exposure, and your doctors consider you to be at particular risk, the usual approach is to put you on an estrogen blocker. Because that, you know, actually blocks the effects of estrogen, making a big difference and not merely something vague at the margins. These things aren't fun, of course -- they cause a kind of chemical instant menopause, and I'm here to tell you that premature and abrupt menopause can be highly unpleasant. (So unpleasant, in fact, that I went on HRT and stayed there.) But in appropriate cases, where you don't want to be kidding around, it is my strong impression that they beat hell out of, "I don't know, maybe I'll stop eating soy."

None of which is to say that you're wrong to do it. You'll have done the research much more recently than I have, for one thing; for another, only you have standing to make this sort of choice. But if you're doing this because it seemed like something you could do, that you have control over, and without compulsively talking to doctors, and if it's freaking you out -- well, maybe you don't really need to do it at all.