Soybeans - Good food for menopausal women

Menopause is a natural change in a woman's body that usually occurs around the age of 45 - 55. This is when the hormones that regulate the activities in a woman's body are severely deficient because the ovaries no longer ovulate.

Hormonal deficiency, in which estrogen plays a very important role, causes many adverse changes in both the body and the mind-physiology during menopause, especially during the “transition” period. Estrogen deficiency causes menopausal women to often experience hot flashes (hot flashes), often sweat a lot at night, be stressed and irritable.

On the other hand, menopausal women often suffer from vaginal dryness and decreased interest in sex. Estrogen deficiency makes the skeletal system of menopausal women more susceptible to fractures due to calcium loss, leading to more porous bones; at the same time, estrogen deficiency can also increase the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Benefits of Soybeans

Meanwhile, women in some Asian countries, especially in Japan, do not experience as much discomfort during menopause as those in North America or Europe. Japan does not even have a word to describe hot flashes, the most common discomfort during menopause.

Many researchers have found that one of the main reasons for this phenomenon is that many Japanese women use soybeans as a daily food and soybeans contribute to providing estrogen to continue regulating the body's activities.

Soybeans are one of the foods rich in isoflavones, which are a type of plant estrogen. Isoflavones have the same function as female estrogen but are weaker. Many researchers have noted that the concentration of isoflavones (in urine) of Japanese women is 100 to 1,000 times higher than that of American or Finnish women.

Soybeans provide isoflavones that reduce discomfort and reduce the risk of disease during menopause in women.

There have been many studies around the world confirming the effectiveness of soy in reducing discomfort during menopause. A group of Italian doctors found that the frequency of hot flashes decreased by 45% in a group of menopausal women who consumed 60g of soy daily (equivalent to 76mg of isoflavones) for 12 weeks.

A soy-rich diet can help stabilize blood pressure and reduce menopausal discomfort without the side effects that can come with hormone replacement therapy. Soy also helps increase calcium absorption into bones and prevent osteoporosis, thereby reducing the risk of fractures. When using a soy-rich diet for 12 weeks, Australian researchers recorded a 5.2% increase in bone density.

If this diet is continued for up to 6 months, the bone density of postmenopausal women is significantly increased. However, the question of the proportion of soy in the diet must reach a certain level to be effective is still not properly answered.

Thus, there is growing evidence that soy can reduce discomfort and reduce the risk of disease during menopause, which is a rather "difficult" period for many women.

Soybeans provide isoflavones, a type of plant estrogen, for the body of menopausal women who are very deficient in estrogen due to the lack of functioning ovaries. A diet rich in soy is an easy, inexpensive recommendation that can bring many benefits besides reducing the discomfort of menopause.

According to SK&DS