[chc]

They contrasted two products, Hershey chocolate and Lindt chocolate, and said Lindt chocolate was worse because it contains isoflavones, when in fact both do. I'm not saying anyone's a hypocrite — I'm pointing out that the concern over "phytoestrogens" in soy is largely the result of pop-nutrition FUD, and in other foods (known by their more common name of "isoflavones"), they are commonly considered to have some health benefits.

[bitexploder]

You are totally right, btw. It is very difficult to eat food based on any sort of nutritional principles. Start from a simple place: I want to limit my consumption of phytoestrogen compounds (isoflavones). Some of them are much stronger than others. Some foods you consume in much larger amounts than others. And, save for extreme cases, phytoestrogen hasn't been shown to cause any real problems in male hormones. Still, they seem worth avoiding.

I guess the point was, it really depends. If you are already getting isoflavones from particular sources and you are controlling for that, then it might make sense to avoid other sources as strenuously as you can (avoid Soy). Which, for me, the only real source of them in my diet is chocolate. Plus not all isoflavones are created equally. Some have stronger estrogen-like effects than others.

In moderation some health benefits. Anyway, I was just pointing out if one of your dietary rules is to "avoid soy" then use a different chocolate bar. It is very difficult to use scientific evidence to build a diet as there is a lot of contradictory evidence the studies available for a given nutritional topic are often of dubious quality. For example, try and take something like the book from T. Colin Campbell, The China Study, and make an evidence based opinion on if he is correct or not. Then look at the work by folks like Ray Peat. You can find endless supporting and non-supporting evidence for virtually any food or compound in food and it becomes a real mess to develop any sort of evidence based diet that isn't "controversial" to some large chunk of reasonably well educated people.