As the saying goes: It’s Deja Vu all over again! Round about 8-9 years ago when the bad news about soy was being found out by researchers. These results were slowly leaking out to the public despite agribusiness pressure to the contrary. The major soy growers (Monsanto, and ADM), knowing they had to do something to support their major cash crop, directly and indirectly sponsored “counter-research” to show that soy was good for all the things the real research was finding soy to be bad for. Due to the inexhaustible funds available to these two, especially Monsanto, their research got a lot more press and air time than the results finding that soy was bad. In statistics, research designed to prove a particular point is called a “self-fulfilling prophecy” in other words the findings are invalid from the get go! Statistics also teaches that no matter how well thought out and done, research findings that do not match observed reality are also invalid. In medicine, clinical experience is the “observed Reality”.

We come to today: in new research meant to find an estrogen replacement for the soy isoflavones that are, as the research reviewers put it, “falling out of favor”, flax and its effects on uterine fibroids are being looked at. Lately, flax has been coming under fire as a source of xenoestrogen and a potential driver of fibroid growth. This has arisen from the fact that many women who have given up all soy products, most beans, have moved away from farm fields and golf courses (where pesticide and organophosphate fertilizers are used) in order to lower their xenoestrogen exposure and consumption still have their fibroids growing. Some of these women have been put on the drug Lupron and are making no hormones of any type of their own yet their fibroids continue to grow. The one common factor these gals had was the fact that they were all taking flax oil as a dietary supplement. No one had told them that the lignans from flax are estrogenic! In most all of these cases when the women stopped eating the flax their fibroids stopped growing! This is the clinical experience. This is the observed reality.

Now we look at the flax growing/ selling company research: One meta study ( a review of studies already done), finds that the lignans from flax are a very mild estrogen and will likely act as estrogen blockers in estrogen sensitive tissues and prevent the occurrence of such things as Fibrocystic Breast Disease, Uterine Fibroids, Endometriosis and Ovarian Cysts. Déjà vu: does anyone remember the study where the isoflavones of soy were said to do the same thing! It turned out not to be so, to the point where the likes of Mayo Clinic now advise their breast cancer survivors to never again eat soy products of any type for fear that it will restart their cancer!

New research showed that women with heightened urinary excretion levels of dietary flax lignans have a lowered incidence of fibroids. The spin is that the more lignans you eat and get rid of, the lower your chances of making your fibroids bigger. Does that make sense to you? This “explanation” of the study results are about as big a spin as former president Clinton not classifying his affair with Monica as a sexual act. When read through, what the study does show is that the gals who got rid of the lignans most had the least growth in their fibroids! SOOO, what if you did not eat the fax and its lignans at all?

We know what the observed reality has found, and no matter what the agribusiness and health food industry concocts to obfuscate the facts will eventually come to light just as the facts about soy being poison have come to be heard and are being reinforced by new research. The question is how many women will suffer before the word on flax is out, how many men will unknowingly emasculate themselves before the word on flax is fully out. The same holds for flax as holds for soy, just because it’s touted and sold as health food does not mean it’s actually healthy! Don’t be a victim!