Isoflavones Seem to Delay Puberty Onset In Girls Thus Increasing Adult Height

For the longest time I always suspected that the superficial level of research and understanding that a person with no scientific training would know about some specific area of the hard sciences from just a few hours of study was not enough. I am ashamed to say that I myself suffer greatly from that aspect, since I mostly try to skim through the abstracts of studies, which is not enough to really understand the material. This post is a clear example of that, which seems to refute a previous claim I had made from making the wrong assumption of the effects of a chemical compound, based on not understand the biochemistry well enough.

Many months ago I wrote the post “Phytoestrogens Found In Soy Based Foods May Explain Why Vegetarians and Asian Ethnicities Have Been Historically Shorter (Very Important!)” which proposed an idea that since people of East Asia eat so much soy based products like tofu, the phytoestrogen in their food was probably what was causing them to end up shorter than other ethnicities on average. The idea was that the phytoestrogen found in tofu is very similar to estrogen, which has been responsible for the onset of growth plate fusion. Of course, the problem there was that there were studies which seemed to contradict themselves on the final result.

My argument was something which was raise before on other height increase forums, when the idea of taking Alfalfa to increase height was contested. (Take a look at the thread “worried about isoflavone content in alfalfa and soybeans“)

Isoflavones prefer to bind to ER-Beta. Estrogen goes for ER-Alpha. (The ER stands for Estrogen Receptor). At the time, I was confused as to which type of estrogen receptor (alpha or beta) the phytoestrogen & the isoflavone were more susceptible to attach to.

Matheus, another height increase researcher called me out on my mistake in assuming that ER-Alpha and ER-Beta binding would have similar effects. Clearly they might not after this recent study I have found.

Read his comment/message made to me below

Matheus might have been right along. The argument made that eating tofu, soy-based products, phytoestrogens, and isoflavones would cause earlier than usual growth plate ossification was not validated.

I refer to the study…

Relation of isoflavones and fiber intake in childhood to the timing of puberty.

From the abstract, we find that for girls who are in the pre-puberty stages, having a higher than average isoflavone diet meant that they actually started puberty much later than their counterparts.

Based on what we understand on the growth progression of adolescents, the girls who started puberty later would on average end up taller when they are adults and have reached full adult bone maturity. This fact is that the main reason why males are on average taller than females later in life is because they started puberty around 1-2 later than females.

There was a 2nd study “Low Phytoestrogen Levels in Feed Increase Fetal Serum Estradiol Resulting in the “Fetal Estrogenization Syndrome” and Obesity in CD-1 Mice” seems to validate this idea. If you take away the phytoestrogen from the diet of pregnant female lab rats, they ended up having earlier than average puberty. In the experiment, the researchers had two groups of pregnant lab rats, which were feed non-soy low-phytoestrogen feed or soy-based high-phytoestrogen feed, and then had the the offspring compared of the two groups.

In addition the baby that they gave birth to started to develop obesity, which is correlated by an increase in the level of estrodial.

At this point, I think we can agree that out of almost every compound we found, estrodial has been one of the worst offenders of growth and would almost always lead to stunted growth.