Hexane is a major fraction of gasoline, so if you live anywhere close to an automobile you've breathed hexane, and it's benign. It's a simple moleculelar chain of six carbons and the rest hydrogen, aka C6H14

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/Hexane-2D-flat-B.png/120px-Hexane-2D-flat-B.png

Don't confuse it with benzene, which is a six-carbon ring.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/67/Benzene_structure.png/120px-Benzene_structure.png

Benzene is a carcinogen, and used to show up in the synthetic gasolines that German's learned to make from coal to work around the embarogoes that would be slapped around them by the Brits during the world wars.

I re-read the anti-soy article which this thread has been based on, and I got more annoyed with each re-reading, because, in fact, there are some points in there that are valid, but I have *never* read a more irresponsibaly, poorly thought out spin-article. It is now in my books as setting a new record in bad, irresponsible *spin*.

Here's why:

In fact, if you're talking about an infant less than 6 months old, the stuff about 4) phytates, 5) lactose, 6) cholesterol, and 7) goitrogens is true, but it would also be true for dozens of other bean, pea, and letile foods that we humans eat all the time, with no ill effect, *unless* being consumed by an infant than six months old, when, from the infant's physiology's point of view, it's only half out of the womb, such that the infant should be consuming mother's milk only for the first six months (human infants are born semi-premature compared to other mammals because if they developed to the same level that other mammal infants do before birth, the child's head would be too large to get through the birth canal, such that humans have to take extra-special care of newborns much more so than other mammals need to of their own, but we can do that, because... we're humans)

The issue about 1) hexane is a big giant *so-what*, because hexane is benign to humans.

The issue about 2) "exposure" to GMO badly spun in that article that ... it makes my head spin, because basically 97% of all plant crops in north america have had some GMO work done on them going back *centuries* (or in the case of corn aka maize, millenia, because indigenous americans did such serious selective breeding of maize that it was impossible for anyone to know where maize as-first-seen-by-europeans came from until genetic science gave enough clues for scientists to backtrack and identify a wild sample, which is a thin whispy grass that look *nothing* like what you think of as corn/maize), which means, if you're going to insist that your infant not eat GMO plants, then you basically have put you and your child (after it's more than six months old) on an all meat diet, which is possible, because Inuit (aka eskimos) have lived on all-meat diets, but the trick is, in order to get things like vitamin C and Folic acid, you have to eat the *whole* animal, and you have to eat it raw, so make sure you freeze it first in order to kill the parasites.

The jazz about 8) aluminum is valid to a degree, in that it's not good to consume too much aluminum, *but*, i) all foods grown in soil have traces of aluminum, so the issue is to not to eat food grown in zones that are better used for an aluminum mine, and ii) yes of course mother's milk has less aluminum than soy, just like it has less aluminum than anything else you see around you.

So, what you can see is that the article is full of some seriously exagerated and misplaced, out-of context concerns, but what really gets-the-goat is the paragraph titles, like: "Lower IQ", as if eating soy *causes* lower IQ, when if you read the paragraph and think about it, it's just saying that if someone eats a diet with no lactose, then they won't ge getting as much galactose, and galactose is "valuable" (note that word "valuable"... not essential... just "valuable") to brain development (in infants... nothing to do with adults, so why is the article being targeted at adults?).

Furthermore, the article fails to mention that almost all people not from a north-west european heritage are lactose intolerant past the age of12, i.e. the majority of humankind on this planet, which means... what? That people who are lactose intolerant are naturaly going to have a lower IQ than those descended from north-west europe, where they evolved the double-recessive for lactose digestion after-age-12 because protien was historically in such short supply in that part of the world that if they couldn't eat milk, they'd have to kill the cow, which wouldn't last long, so they died if they couldn't live on milk (and thus the north-west european fascination with cheeze as a milk preservative).

The headers of every paragraph are equaly twisted and way blown beyond the norms of even extrordinary spin, so I'm thinking that the author *had* to be busy and so let a junior intern with a fresh and unpracticed degree in spinology (an probably with bad grades to boot) write the article, and I can already tell you what will happen if too much of this kind of bad spinning happens:

It used to be that advertizing was over the top, and would make false claims, such that finally people said, "Okay, we know you're going to make some hyped up claims in order to sell you product, but on the bottom line you can't lie," and so laws were enacted forcing advertizers to stick to the truth, no matter how exagerated the claims.

Likewise, if spin like this gets too out of hand, people are going to get fed up and laws are going to be passed telling the spin-doctors that if they want to twirl an object in the air so people will see it both front and back before making a judgement, go ahead, but it *Has To Be The Object That The Judgement Is Being Passed Upon That You Are Spinning*!!!

I know some hungry corporate and media lawyers (well... one...) who'd *love* to take on a case like that if there's a way he could get paid for it, so someone had better inform that article's author that she's flicking-her-bic in front of a powder keg.

I hope you are not commenting on my particular response. Perhaps, if you have the time, you could revise the beginning so it at least points to the comment you really want to respond to. Thanks

PS - I said "infants should be comsuming mother's milk only for the first three months", but actually it would have been more clear to say, "infants should be consuming mother's milk, and mother's milk only, for the first six months".

I wasn't commenting on your post in particular. I hit the wrong tab for submitting a Reply to a post I'd made earlier, because I wanted to expand on my own post, but I wasn't watching, and you're was the last post in the list, and that's the Reply button I clicked.