Anyone else had problems with soy products??

My daughter is 5 and is allergic to dairy. She has been having soy milk and soy yoghurt for about 3 years. She has slight breast budding which is called thelarche. It is a benign condition caused by the leftover oestogen from my breast milk.(that's what the doctor told me). I stopped the soy milk for a few months and the thelarche was practically gone. I reintroduced the soy and it has started to return on one side. Also my daughter's behaviour became intolerable, just like a moody teenager. I realised it could be linked to the soy, so I stopped it at once. My daughter is much more settled and I am just waiting to see if her thelarche goes away too. I'm wondering if the phytoestrogens in the soy milk are responsible. Has anyone else encountered problems like this from using soy milk or soy products??
Answer:
Despite the many benefits of soy that people are always screaming about, you should know that soy is one of the most recent food products in our dietary history. In other words, not everyone has totally adapted to digesting soy and soy products. The Chinese are probably the most adapted with soy, but even they can still be allergic to it. There's also growing evidence that soy and soy products can increase a body's naturally available estrogen; weight lifters tend to avoid soy products for exactly that reason. For growing young women who are experiencing a rush of hormones, it's probably not a good idea to add additional ones.I tend to keep my soy products to a minimum, sticking with just edamame (soy beans in the shell) once or twice a week. For a good sources of calcium try shrimp, sesame seeds, spinach, rice milk, calcium fortified orange juice (some can have as much as a cup of milk), and even calcium supplements.

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I used to love soy milk a lot, and I drank it so much that evewntually it started to give me horrible allergy. Only soy milk, though (not yogurt or tofu). Every time I have soy milk (even in juice or in tea), my throat would get so itchy and I will loose my voice, I will have to clear my throat constantly - disgusting! I think it's because I had too much soy milk.
Now, what your daughter is having might be just an allergic reaction. Children can develop allergies to any product, especially soy or nuts. If she just eats soy products (not soy supplements for women), there is not enough hormones (phytoestrogens) to cause hormonal reaction. If it was so, menopausal women would be treated by soy milk and yogurt, but they cannot. Phytoestrogens are derived from soy and put in supplement form very concentrated (you would need to eat pounds upon pounds of soy to get same amount of phytoestrogens as in a single pill). Just avoid giving soy to your daughter. She is 5, so allergies to dairy and to soy should not be your biggest problem, as it would have been if she was younger. Just feed her fruit, veggies, meat, eggs - anything she is not allergic to.

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Soy is one of the most common allergens. Children who are exposed to soy often while they are very young have a higher chance of developing an allergy to soy products. I know this from research, and personal experience.Short story of my daughter's allergy - I nursed her until she was about 5 months old and was told to stop by several doctors because she was having digestive problems and they wanted to put her on a specialized formula called Pregestimil. She was on that for awhile and then my pediatrician suggested that I put her on soy formula. After she was done with the bottle, we moved on to soy milk and she drank that for about 2 1/2 years until she started having allergy symptoms. She is now 4 and allergic to many different foods, soy being one of them.I would suggest that you take her in to an allergist to have her tested - not only for soy but for the other top allergens. Children who are allergic to soy are also commonly allergic to other things, the major one being peanuts. You need to be very careful and vigilant about food allergies, they can be extremely serious (sometimes deadly). Here's a snippet from the first website about the soy-peanut allergy link:"Even more intriguing, Lack says, is the fact that children with peanut sensitivity were significantly more likely to have been fed a soy-based formula or milk. Overall, 8.3 percent of the infants had consumed such products. Among those with peanut allergy, the rate was 24.5 percent. Indeed, the researchers observe, "of the 10 children for whom data on the first consumption of soy milk or soy formula were available, 9 had consumed soy before reacting to peanuts."

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