Obesity, meanwhile, is seen at the second-highest rates in the world in the burger-addled United States. Men who are truly concerned about the appearance of “man boobs” might note that the colloquial definition usually involves fatty tissue, not breast tissue. Diet is not the only factor that contributes to obesity, and in the United States, it can be difficult for people to change how they eat: You simply can't go to healthy restaurants or find good groceries in a lot of the country. Even so, men who have the time and means to eat well and want to avoid fatty tissue on their chests might try to avoid fast food generally rather than pinning their anxieties on a vegetable.

Read: Inflammation’s hidden role in weight loss

Unlike soy consumption, obesity has long been known to be associated with decreases in testosterone. Low testosterone is associated with erectile dysfunction, which is also determined more by overall metabolic health than by eating or avoiding any single food. Soy was implicated in one strange case report from 2011, where a man lost his sex drive after becoming vegan, then regained it after a year of eating meat again. But the time frame makes it unlikely that the meat was the curative agent, and even the doctors reporting the case say it’s the only one to link soy consumption and testosterone levels, even though it’s not the only one to investigate such a correlation. Broader reviews of evidence have found no difference in testosterone levels between vegans and carnivores.

On the whole, concerns about soy and sexualization draw from scattered cases and isolated data points. Claims like Stangle’s play into concerns more fundamental than a literal fear of estrogen. The myth of physical feminization has its basis in existential concerns about power and status. Adams has studied this idea at length. She and other scholars have argued that the idea of veganism is rolled up with qualities like compassion, conscientiousness, and empathy—for animals or the environment. By modern American cultural standards, these are feminine traits. Violence, physical domination, and self-interest are masculine. Add in the global history of colonization, Adams says, and meat has become equated with white, heterosexual men. “Now it’s kind of like plant-based meats are here to take away their identity,” she says. “So eating meat is a sort of reactionary attempt to reclaim something that’s already been lost.”

I emailed Stangle for his take on the fallout from his post. He flatly said he had been wrong, specifically about the 18 million number.

“I wrote my article for a small local paper never expecting it to go viral. When it did, I fact-checked myself and issued a retraction,” he replied. “As is usually the case, the retraction didn't get much traction.”

This wasn’t what I was expecting to hear. I perused Stangle’s retraction note in the beef newspaper, which included an apology with the sort of candor rarely seen on the internet: “Most of the response was to the comment that if a guy ate four impossible whoppers per day, he would eventually grow breasts,” Stangle wrote. “To be true, there is no evidence that this can happen.”