I’ve seen a lot of really hysterical posts and questions about this lately. Most of the upset seems to be stemming from a single person whose claims about soy are only one of a number of unverifiable and unbelievable claims she makes. It’s odd that one person can gather so many believers by posting completely unscientific claims in a lot of places, but this is the internet.
For years, soy has been acknowledged by rat fanciers and by rat laboratories to have a HEALTHY effect on rats. It lowers obesity, increases estrogen to calm aggression, can help repair damaged kidneys, decreases weight gain in hormone-deprived rats, and is a good, safe staple protein. While raw soy flour has been shown to increase at rat’s risk of pancreatic cancer, there are no rat diets that contain raw flour. And while the increase in estrogen in growing male pups has been shown to have a risk of decreasing fertility, the average pet owner does not need to worry about that. A soy diet has even been shown to have a beneficial analgesic effect in rats with chronic nerve pain!
These studies are easy to find – once you wade through the artificially-inflated Google ratings of the single anti-soy person posting and re-posting everywhere. Studies from reputable medical journals and laboratories, not un-scientific “studies” done by a person in their house, with no control groups and no scientific limitation on exactly what is being restricted from the animals.
Soy will not cause respiratory reactions in rats. The only reason that an animal or person would have a respiratory reaction to any particular kind of dust would be an allergy. In such cases, it would need to be treated as an allergy, with antihistamines and with epinephrine to treat the anaphylaxis in very severe cases. Allergic reactions cannot be treated with antibiotics, which are used to treat infectious agents. And of course, a veterinarian would be necessary to diagnose and prescribe such drugs – it is illegal to distribute antibiotics, and many other drugs, without a medical license.
An allergic attack so severe that it leads to anaphylaxis would also be over quickly. You would not see animals dying over a long period of time. That animal would be dead within minutes if they were not treated.
One should take into consideration the fact that Harlan-Teklad rat diet, which contains soy, is part of the largest manufacturer and supplier of laboratory diets and animals in the country. Each laboratory spends hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in research and their animals. In order to get their research to turn out with consistent, correct results, all the variables are, as much as possible, controlled.
That means that the animals are not being exposed to the dust, dander, mold and outside air that animals in a home are exposed to every day. There is simply NO WAY to do a scientific experiment in ones home, one cannot control the environment the way a laboratory can.
Diet is a huge factor in controlling the environment and health of animals used in a laboratory study. They want each animal to be healthy and consistent so that they can understand the animal’s reactions to whatever drug or stimulus they are testing. If they’re looking at a carcinogenic agent, they need to know that each animal who gets cancer is getting it from the experiment, not from some uncontrolled factor in the diet. Thousands and thousands of animals are used for these experiments, and they are all fed this same consistent diet.
If soy was as bad for rats as has been recently claimed, then there would be no way that Harlan-Teklad would contain it, because laboratories everywhere would demand its removal. If soy really caused respiratory attacks so severe they cause death, seizures, cancer, and all the other negatives being attributed to it right now, there would be no way for labs to do their experiments and get consistent results. You would see Harlan pull soy from those formulas faster than you can say Jack Robinson – because companies and labs are spending millions of dollars on these experiments and the formulation of these foods. No one is going to shoot their bottom line in the foot like that “just because” they want to use soy.
You can ask any veterinarian or veterinary technician student – the animals they get from laboratories in order to practice necropsies and anatomical lessons are pristine. Part of the trouble my veterinarian had in establishing a bottom line for a healthy “home colony” animal when I first started working with her was that we simply have too many variables and stresses on our animals, compared to laboratory animals, to establish what the anatomy of a pet animals should look like. A very healthy pet animal is still going to be run down and beat up compared to the average lab animal because of the sterile environment and complete biological control put on every aspect of their lives. That would not be the case if the soy in lab diets was killing rats.
Whenever anyone says they are performing a “study,” there needs to be environmental controls in place. Interference from any other chemical or addition to the environment such as fumes from a cleaner in the next room, dander of other pets, pollen from the windows, mold from the attic – all of that needs to be eliminated. All the water has to be filtered and controlled consistently. The animals must be bred consistently, so that genetic differences from one line of descent to the other doesn’t interfere and change your results. All the animals need to be in exactly the same size cage, with exactly the same number and gender and temperament of rats in it. All the diet intake has to be absolutely consistent – the same exact food, portions, and restriction of things like chewing boxes and hammocks that might contain chemicals or be swallowed in bulk and throw off results. And there has to be a control group – an IDENTICAL group in IDENTICAL circumstances, except for the ONE thing you are studying. None of this is possible in a home environment, especially not from rats who have been introduced to the home as adults, with unknown genetics and unknown feeding and veterinary background. It is simply impossible.
Those who are avoiding using the healthiest and most consistent diet we have on the market today because of hysterical claims that one ingredient is bad should simply look at the facts. Do some research, check out reputable medical and veterinary journals, speak to people who have been using the diet and have never seen anything resembling these reactions. One person’s anecdotal evidence is not proof – thousands of actual studies done in actual laboratories are.
Bao Varakhii Rattery 
Ugh! Thank you for saying something so intelligible and scientifically based about this. People are just making up their own diets using food meant for other animals, that is not nutritionally balanced for rats. It’s probably doing more harm than good.
Oh yes I do know who you are talking about lol. She has blamed soy for killing a rat of mine. Love the aricle!
Now, donchano dem soy police is gunna git ya now? LOL”Great article! I have taken so much abuse because I said what you said. Now it is in a blog! Censor that you uber mods!
And then there is GENETICALLY MODIFIED soy which is what is used in commercial rat foods-It is a science project and not food at all not for me or my animals!…My rats will never be fed anything but human grade food w/ human grade/quality vitamins and nutrients- “PET FOOD” on the market is there to make MONEY(Just like the pine and cedar bedding with pictures of small animals on it-though it is toxic to them)-those who make it dont care about your pet at all….
SOY may not pose a threat to your rats but the soy in commercial rat food certainly does-LOOK UP GENETICALLY MODIFICATED SOY if your going to research anything!
Yup, I sure did look up GMO while I was educating myself.
You seem to be missing the point though.
The fact that the lab food is formulated to MAKE MONEY is exactly why I know it’s safe and balanced. Because animal labs are a multi-million dollar industry with important ties to pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, which are two of the largest industries in the country.
Because they HAVE to have food that is going to keep their results on an even keel, if the soy in Harlan Lab blocks was causing the kind of bad reactions that the anti-soy hystericals are claiming, laboratories would NOT use it. Why? Money, pure and simple. It would be a waste of millions of dollars if their results were constantly being skewed by a bad ingredient in the food.
Now I am by no means claiming that the rat food you can buy stacked next to the pine and cedar is safe. On the contrary, I believe you’d be better off emptying your leftovers into your rat cage than feeding LM, Kaytee, or the Walmart/Meijer/etc brands of “rat food.”
But when you’re talking about a food especially formulated for laboratory animals who NEED to be identically healthy so that the tests being run on them can have validity? Yeah, that money talks.
And for those STILL worried about soy in their rats diets….I spoke with Harlan Teklad, and their global diets (2014, 2016, etc) are pretty much soy free anyways…they just have some soybean oil, as the 5th or 6th ingredient.
I have recently encountered this anti soy person myself. Shes posted it 2 times on my pages and has now been blocked. And while I myself do have a soy allergy and do not like to use it… I have yet to find any scientific data to back up her outlandish and very aggressive push to rid the rat community of it. I used Harlan for 3 years and liked the results and had very healthy rats. And of nice weight. But I did notice a decrease in life expectancy over my grain mix. But I don’t blame that on soy as the pellet I use in my grain has soy in it as well. So I am unsure what the reason was, as I have not out crossed and have been using the same lines for many years. But any time you make a claim like this you better have some intelligent information to back it up. And I didn’t see any.
I have been a at owner for 12 years and have constantly tried to feed them the best food possible. I also have a degree in zoology and have worked for 3 major universities in their research facilities. At my current university there is a research lab working on breast cancer that specifically requested soy-free food for their rats because of the variable that having soy in the food would cause. You indicated that animals for study are pristine. Usually this is because they come from breeding facilities that breed specific pathogen free animals and the animals shipped are typically fairly young. I agree that doing a study at home isn’t conclusive because of uncontrolled variables and the sample size being too small to be statistically viable. I believe that more studies would need to be done on various types of soy products to nail down which, if any, may potentially cause a problem. I personally try to stay away from anything that is over-processed for myself and my pets.