Eating soy may protect against reproductive effects of BPA

Eating soy foods may help protect against reproductive effects of bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical in many plastic consumer products and lining the inside of some canned foods, according to a study of women undergoing fertility treatments.

“The results were actually exactly what we were expecting to find,” said lead author Dr. Jorge E. Chavarro of the Harvard School of Public Health-Nutrition in Boston.

BPA is known to mimic estrogen in the body, and therefore it’s believed to disrupt conception and implantation of a fertilized egg in the womb, the researchers write in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.

Experiments in rodents suggest that soy, which also interacts with estrogen receptors, could offset or mitigate those effects of BPA, they add.

“We wanted to follow-up on the results of two experimental models in rodents where two independent groups had found that some adverse reproductive effects of BPA could be prevented by placing the mice on a soy based diet,” Chavarro told Reuters Health by email. “We wanted to see whether a similar interaction occurred in humans.”

The researchers studied 239 women who underwent in vitro fertilization cycles between 2007 and 2012. The women completed dietary questionnaires and provided urine samples before egg retrieval for each fertility cycle.