Monday, March 23, 2020

Why is the coronavirus so much more deadly for men than for women?

Being a veqan I used to eat lots of soy products and drink soy milk. Then I read an article that I didn't realise was indirectly sponsored by the meat companies which said that soy puts dangerous levels of estrogen into men's bodies, and that it was cancerous too. Yikes! The article also said soy was dangerous for women.

It was rubbish, and although soy does increase estrogen type chemicals in the body, it is not harmful at the amounts normally consumed.

Anyway, Mary Enig, who wrote the article, was right about saturated fat, it's nowhere near as harmful as scientists once believed.

I eat soy products now, but could it be time to also consider stocking a soy isoflavone supplement just in case? I don't know if it can help, but it is pretty cheap.

To Perlman, those dual findings strongly suggest that there’s something about estrogen that protects against the ravages of deadly coronaviruses — and he suspects it’s true for the new SARS-CoV-19 virus as well.
“Why does estrogen protect the woman, and how?” Perlman said. “We’d like to know.” Estrogen has so many important roles in the female body, “it’s hard to prove anything” about its specific protective powers, he said.
Los Angeles Times 

6 comments:

Peter Pan said...

Thanks, but I'll stick with orange juice. I'm limited by the amount I can safely haul in my backpack, while riding my bicycle.

lastgreek said...

I eat soy products now, but could it be time to also consider stocking a soy isoflavone supplement just in case? I don't know if it can help, but it is pretty cheap.

K, supplements (including vitamins) are not regulated. You have no idea what's in those pills/tablets. If you're lucky, as in no harm done, they contain nothing but sugar or some other filler like sawdust. Stick to food from your super market, K :)

I recall an American news story some years back about an online supplements store. This online store consisted of two guys and a woman, and they were all charged with fraud (eventually convicted) by the FBI for double-billing their customers' credit cards. And what were these supplements? Well, I am glad you asked :) These supplements were dick enlargement pills (don't laugh, even CNN used to run dick enlargement pill commercials during Wolf Blitzer's show, which, btw, is all you need to know about the seriousness of CNN as a news organization). These pills were harmless enough since they contained no harmful or banned ingredients ( if I recall, they contained 3 parts sugar for every part sawdust, or something like that.) Now here's the interesting part: There is no law against selling such nonsense, it's basically buyer beware. But there is a law against stealing, that is, double billing in this case. And that is what did them in. It was really a shame because their business was doing great. In the few years of selling these supplements online, they had amassed a fortune of 10s of millions of dollars. -- they did not have to resort to stealing too. So why then did they resort to stealing from these suckers, too? Well, they got greedy for one, and, two, they figured that no one would dare go to the authorities and report that they were double-billed for buying dick enlargement pills; you know, out of shame and embarrassment. Unfortunately for these two guys and the woman, there was such a man -- a man who felt no such shame in letting the world know he had a small dick. (snicker)

S400 said...

Look at men who get the flu or a cold, they often complain more than women how sick they are. Maybe men’s immune system are not as good and therefore they really get sickier (TM Trump) or they are just sissies.

Kaivey said...

When I get a cold I tell my gf and her friends that I have man-flu. It's really bad, I tell them.

Kaivey said...

You're right, there, it should be regulated better. There was a big campaign in the UK about 30 years ago to stop the regulations. The conspiracy theory was that the pharmaceutical companies wanted to put the supplement manufacturers out of business, but that are all as bad each other.

Recent tests show that they often have only a fraction of what is stated on the bottle, and some products had none. But there are some high quality suppliers out there, well, I'm thinking of one in particular.

Peter Pan said...

Boomer Remover:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/23/boomer-remover/

Every cloud has a silver lining?