How Safe Is Soy Infant Formula?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 25, 2001 | by David Goodman

At least some of this soy formula, which tested at up to 200 times the manganese of breast milk clearly has the potential to overload the infant's little body. Lonnerdal says the baby's immature liver cannot handle the manganese load by excreting the excess. In newborns, ingested manganese rises to high levels in the blood plasma and red blood cells, then permeates the liver, kidneys and other soft tissues of the body, including the brain. He believes, however, that by the time of weaning, when the infant normally consumes solid food, it can metabolize manganese.

Crinella calculated that by the age of 8 months an infant fed soy formula daily absorbs approximately 1.1 mg of manganese above metabolic need. "A significant amount, about 8 percent, is deposited in a brain region vulnerable to threat of manganese attack," he says.

Six years ago, tragic incidents in two London hospitals, the Hospital for Sick Children and Queen Elizabeth's Hospital for Children, alerted the medical community to the vulnerability of sick babies to manganese attacks on the brain. Suffering from liver disease, the babies had received nutrient solutions containing recommended amounts of manganese through an intravenous tube. The manganese had no greater concentration than in soy formula and was considered safe by government standards, but after a few months the infant brains showed damage.

Of 57 babies receiving "safe" amounts of manganese, two fell ill with movement disorders and six suffered damage to their basal ganglia when examined by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

John Donaldson, a toxicologist who was a speaker at the UC-Irvine conference, pinpointed a biochemical lesion in basal ganglia waylaid by manganese. He reported how manganese in the brain can elevate its electrical charge, increasing the metal's virulence tenfold and attacking the vulnerable neurons that function as transmitters for the key brain chemical dopamine. Damage to these dopamine cells in the basal ganglia, as shown by last year's Nobel Prize winner in medicine, Arvid Carlsson, is symptomatic of Parkinson's disease.

Also, Crinella has done extensive studies on the effect of manganese in adolescents. His research detected relatively high levels of manganese in the scalp hair of hyperactive children when compared with matched control subjects. He had been alerted by earlier work by UC-Irvine psychiatrist Louis Gottschalk, who had detected elevated manganese in scalp hair of youths convicted of felony crimes and incarcerated in four Southern California prisons. He wondered whether the metal had anything to do with child hyperactivity since that syndrome has been attributed to a disturbance in the basal ganglia.

Crinella at first was puzzled by the high manganese levels in hyperactive children. The only exposure of his subjects had to be through diet, yet California has historic low levels of manganese in its soil, air and water. Because adolescents metabolize at least 97 percent of manganese ingested, the exposure had to have occurred earlier in life, possibly from manganese in baby food, or (as his research proceeded further) soy-based infant formula. Could elevated manganese be a clue to the current epidemic of adolescent violence sweeping the nation?