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Is Soy-based Infant Formula Brain Damaging?

Press Release

David Goodman, Ph.D,

For eighteen years, newborn babies have been fed by infant formula high in the toxic metal manganese. Common sense teaches that a brain-damaging substance cannot be fed by bottle to our most vulnerable citizens. Yet research ongoing for a decade at two University of California campuses affirms that manganese in infant formula may damage the infant brain and trigger aberrant behavior in adolescents.

This week's INSIGHT MAGAZINE ONLINE (www.insightmag.com) in a special report by David Goodman affirms that the soy infant formula currently on shelves permits an estimated safe manganese dose of 0.6 mgs. about 120 times the amount found in mother's milk. Excess manganese that the baby cannot metabolize is stored in body organs, about eight percent in the brain, in proximity to dopamine-bearing neurons responsible, in part, for adolescent neurological development.

Under the direction of Carl Keen, Ph.D. and Bo Lonnerdahl, Ph.D. at UC Davis and Frank Crinella, Ph.D. and Louis Gottschalk, MD, Ph.D. at UC Irvine, UC professors have tracked migration of manganese from the digestive track to the brain, in particular to nerve cells in the basal ganglia bearing the neurotransmitter dopamine. Evidence for damage to these critical basal ganglia cells active during adolescence in rats was reported at a Fall 2000 conference at UCI by Dr. Francis Crinella and Trin Tranh, has been replicated this month at the UC Davis laboratories.

The implications are that the one of eight infants during the first six months of life given soy formula may be at risk for brain and behavioral disorders not evident until adolescence, a charge denied by the soy industry. Highly suggestive, the results of brain damage from soy infant formula cannot yet be accepted as applicable to human infants until further lab studies are carried out in the laboratory on primates, and epidemiological studies on human children. Nonetheless, the findings remain provocative and should be widely discussed, especially since thousands of poor mothers receive soy formula from the government-funded WIC program.