Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Reduce Adverse Effects of BPA with Soy Consumption

BPA or chemicals found in many plastic products as well as some canned food, according to a study could affect the female reproductive system that is associated with fertility.

BPA is able to mimic estrogen in the body, and therefore is believed to interfere with fertilization and implantation of the fertilized egg in the uterus, so the researchers wrote in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.

Avoid plastic or cans without BPA, is not easy. However, researchers are trying to find ways for reproductive effects on BPA can be reduced. "And the results are really like what we expected," said study leader Harvard School of Public Health-Nutrition in Boston.

Experiments conducted in rodents showed that soy, which also interacts with estrogen receptors, could offset or mitigate the ill effects of BPA.

"We want to follow up the results of experiments in rodents in which the adverse reproductive effects of BPA can be prevented by placing a mouse on a soy-based diet," said Chavarro. "We want to see if the same interactions occur in humans."

The researchers then observed 239 women undergoing fertilization cycles between 2007 and 2012. The women were asked to complete a questionnaire and provide a urine sample prior to egg retrieval for each fertility cycle.

The questionnaire contains the daily intake of soy-based foods, including tofu, soy burgers, miso soup, soy protein, and soy snacks.

Among the respondents, there is never eaten at all, less than once per month, or even twice a day. Nearly three-quarters of the women said, they quite often eat soy.

As a result, when the level of BPA in the urine increases, the women who did not eat soy have less opportunity for fertilization and pregnancy. But for women who regularly consumed soy, increased levels of BPA did not affect their fertility.

In previous studies in mice, BPA is known to turn on and off certain genes and soy can prevent the CPA to do so, said Chavarro.

"We still want to evaluate whether this effect could apply to couples who are running the program conceived without medical help," said Chavarro.

Although according to the US Food and Drug Administration levels of BPA in food containers is relatively safe, but based on nationally representative survey in mind that more than 90 percent of Americans are exposed to BPA exposure from low-level to high.

BPA exposure can be minimized by reducing the consumption of canned foods and replace them with fresh food, or replacing the plastic containers with glass or metal.

This is the first study to find a correlation between the effects of BPA and food intake in humans.

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