Does eating sex hormones (testosterone, estrogen are the specific ones I have in mind) do anything? I know you can inject those, and they'll be useful, but if I ate those, would there be any significant changes that could be attributed to the hormones compared to placebo?
Why I'm asking is because I've heard that soy can somehow... make you less of a man*.
Don't believe it, basically.
This comes from "bro-science" where they talk about those "soy boys". It's been pretty thoroughly debunked. Both male and female people make both testosterone and estrogen. While soy has phytoestrogens, these may cause your body to make
less of the natural estrogens in compensation.
There are some rat studies that shows phytoestrogens can cause some problems, these studies get reported in bro-science weightlifting articles, but they're of the type of studies where they're force-feeding them 30 times their own bodyweight of the stuff per day (so to speak, not exact amount). Absolutely amazing quantities of the stuff, far more than a person could eat. At which point, basically
anything is a problem.
I mean, if it was real you'd have articles such as "I ate tofu every day and grew breasts", but there are no such articles.
And, look it up, they have done studies where weight lifters were given either whey protein, soy protein or other types of protein. None of these studies have found a statistically significant difference between the different types of protein for body-building, or you'd have heard about that as proof.
But despite the lack of scientific evidence, body builders swear off soy for it's 'feminizing' properties, despite the clear lack of evidence that this makes any fucking difference whatsoever. They make concentrated soy protein powder, you can chug that stuff all day because it's cheaper than whey protein, yet nobody ever comes forward saying they did this and had any negative consequences.
EDIT should add sources to read:
https://www.mensjournal.com/food-drink/does-soy-really-cause-man-boobs/Some kids are raised on soy milk instead of cow’s milk their whole lives. A 2004 Italian study of kids raised on soy protein formulas showed no gynecomastia, no early puberty, no changes in their bones and no other signs of screwed up hormones.
You can drink soy milk for your whole life and doctors won't be able to detect any difference to someone who was raised on cow milk. It's debunked.