There’s good news for women concerned with growing heavier as they grow older. Researchers from the Monell Chemical Senses Center say adding a certain food to your diet may keep weight off.

KYW’s Pat Loeb reports women of a certain age know, there comes a point when it seems anything you eat shows up directly in the fat around your tummy. Researchers have theorized that it’s related to declining levels of the female hormone estrogen.

Monell Center researcher Michelle Murphy says her experiments with rats shows that adding soy to their diets reversed age-related weight gain because soy contains chemicals very similar to estrogen:

“We put the animals on a diet that included soy phytoestrogen so they were six weeks on the diet and we started to see their body weight go back down to normal levels compared to control animals.”

Murphy says this is good news because adding soy to your diet is an easy and natural way to make up for lost estrogen and the unwanted weight gain that goes with it.