Phytoestrogens are plant compounds that act similarly to female hormones. They are chemically different from estrogens. These are not steroids, but other chemistry. But they can work.
Some have fantasized that phytoestrogens can be a safe substitute for estrogens. At the same time, people do not bother at all that if phytoestrogens act like ordinary estrogens, then they will harm in the same way as ordinary estrogens do.
Many impressionable people are shocked by the information that chemical estrogens are made just from plant materials. There, of course, there will be a complex technological process, but the fact remains - it is their plants that estrogens do.
Not everyone has heard that phytoestrogens can act like estrogens, and can act against estrogens. And the devil knows exactly how and on what receptors this soy will act today.
The largest group of estrogens is found in soy and other legumes. There are also phytoestrogens from grains, seeds and other plants.
There was a time when there were especially many biologically active food supplements with various phytoestrogens. They were expected to help cope with age-related estrogen decline.
These fantasies were tested in a bunch of different scientific studies, but no intelligible results were obtained. Some scientists swear that the drugs work, others poke statistics in their noses and shout that nothing of the kind has been recorded.
The most popular fact is the reduction of some types of cancer in Asian women who have been eating soy since childhood. No such dependence has been found in the Western world.
Here it seems to me that this is the point - phytoestrogens are structurally similar to chemical industrial hormones. If you choose especially active representatives of this species, how to clean them, chew them over them and knead them thicker, then the resulting brew will not yet be officially called industrial estrogen, but it no longer looks like the soy from which it was done. It is very possible that it will somehow work.
Officially, phytoestrogens do not help anyone. If you try, you can find something herbal that, after processing by the caring hands of Chinese chemists, will somehow act. Nobody knows why it works. Maybe we are still misunderstanding something in this matter, or maybe manufacturers slightly flavored plant raw materials with chemical estrogen.
You can't fool nature. Any effective remedy will be effective only because it unbalances something in our body. If this effect cannot be explained, then it is better to wait for now. Let the scientists figure it out.
