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Underground > Laboratory >

Soy Controversy

00:14 / 09.12.06

Recently someone brought to my attention some anti-soy information which makes some pretty alarming claims about the negative aspects of soy consumption. Among the dangers listed for soy consumers are mineral and vitamin deficiences, infertility, increased cancer risk, hypothyroidism, stunted growth, blood clots, premature sexual development, premature aging, increased risk of Alzeimers... basically this is the world's most evil and toxic food and hurts small farmers to boot. I'm finding this very frightening as I went vegetarian 6 months ago and consume a substantial amount of soy. Can anyone enlighten me a little on this subject? Is this information to be trusted? Is a soy-based diet dangerous?

Here are the two links that I've read through. Second one branches off into more anti-soy resources.

Weston Price Soy Alert

"Tragedy and Hype" from Nexus Magazine

13:38 / 10.12.06

I never know what to believe when one reads such food scare story type things. My opinion is that as long as you eat a balanced diet, with lots of fresh fruit and veg youll be fine. If you eat too much of anything its going to have bad side affects..... carrots turn you orange or whatever!!

Ive cut dairy out of my diet for almost 2 1/2 years and have been eating soy products but, i do try to eat fresh food,beans/pulses - not just meat/dairy substitutes, like if i have soy yoghurt one week, ill drink rice milk that week...sounds a bit obsessive but it works for me. Dairy made me feel so ill, i dont see any need to eat it again.

Another thing about soy is that is consummed in vast quantities by the japanese, who have the world highest life expectancies, so in conclusion just eat what you like!

17:02 / 10.12.06

this reminds me of reports on coffee and wine in the press: one day they're good for you in small quantities, prevent bad conditions at old age etc, the next day it's the oposite. i wouldn't rule out a heavy lobby on both sides acting in the background.

speaking from a personal perspective, I've been a vegtarian and soy consumer for 15 years now [I'm 30] and I have never experienced anything bad related to it. I eat soy protein in the form of frozen hamburguers, sausages and other meat-like foods [heh], mostly baked rather than fried.

I still eat cow milk cheese and everything you can use it in [bread, pizza and all kinds of pasta] and this year I've turned to drinking soy milk and abandoned cow milk - at least wherever I can choose it [at home, mostly, vegan joints are not common in Brazil yet].

I have to tell you I've done all kinds of exams - complete blood tests, heart performance tests - etc etc and I go to the gym almost everyday now and don't feel anymore tired than a regular meat-eating person.

I've never been anemic [I donate blood from time to time although it's been some months now] and I'm not a sickly person, save for my throat being generally a weak spot when winter comes - but I'm afraid that's just me.

so, while there are those questions related to growing soy in terms of health it will only do you good if you keep a balanced diet as our friend above has said. hope this helps.

03:12 / 11.12.06

Another thing about soy is that is consummed in vast quantities by the japanese, who have the world highest life expectancies, so in conclusion just eat what you like!

Well, the sources I linked actually state this is a common misconception and that the Japanese actually consume an average of about 2 tablespoons of soy per day - more like a condiment than a staple.

The idea of a balanced diet makes sense on the face of it, but not if you buy into the idea that soy is actually toxic as the above sources claim.

Hydra vs Leviathan

12:58 / 12.12.06

Well, i've heard worse about dairy (and still eat it, as well as soy, in different culinary contexts)...

The biggest issue for me with soy (as with meat and dairy, in fact) is not so much a health issue as an evironmental sustainability one - IIRC, the majority of the world's soy is currently grown in extremely unsustainable conditions, often using, for example, previously-rainforest land which has been cleared for the puproses of soy production (altho, to complicate matters, IIRC the majority of the world's soy crop is actually grown not to feed humans, but to feed meat and dairy cattle)...

On an anecdotal level, while i currently (due to living with vegans) use soy milk in things like tea, the thing i've found which i prefer the taste of, both in tea and on cereal, to both soy milk and cow milk is oat milk - it doesn't look as "milky" as soy or dairy milk,being less opaque (you have to get used to the look of it in tea), but doesn't have either the hint-of-slightly-rancid-fat that cow milk does or the nasty dry/sticky mouth effect that soy milk has, and i find the slight "oatiness" of the taste of it actually quite pleasant...

I also find heavily processed soya products (like that "Scheese" type stuff, and some of the meat substitutes) quite unpleasant, but probably no more so than heavily processed animal products.

TBH i strongly suspect a lot of the more scaremongering stuff about the "toxicity" of soya is propaganda spread by the dairy industry, and possibly also vice versa...

17:32 / 12.12.06

Apparently, it'll make you gay...

I have nothing against an occasional soy snack. Soy is nutritious and contains lots of good things. Unfortunately, when you eat or drink a lot of soy stuff, you're also getting substantial quantities of estrogens.

Estrogens are female hormones. If you're a woman, you're flooding your system with a substance it can't handle in surplus. If you're a man, you're suppressing your masculinity and stimulating your "female side," physically and mentally.
...
Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That's why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today's rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products.

19:13 / 12.12.06

That article is incorrect. Incorrect in so many ways that it made me a little angry, and I'm not sure whether to ignore it or make some comment.

Soy doesn't contain estrogens but isoflavones, which are chemically similar to estrogen. They may or may not mimic some of the functions of estrogens in humans. Estrogens themselves are naturally produced (albeit at low levels) by all men, and I don't think they're ever been linked to sexual desire (towards anyone/thing).

01:13 / 13.12.06

From the same "article":

For example, if your baby gets colic from cow's milk, do you switch him to soy milk? Don't even think about it. His phytoestrogen level will jump to 20 times normal. If he is a she, brace yourself for watching her reach menarche as young as seven, robbing her of years of childhood. If he is a boy, it's far worse: He may not reach puberty till much later than normal.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't cow's milk contain Bovine Growth Hormone, which pretty much has the same effect?

01:49 / 13.12.06

and cow milk will turn your baby into a giant horned freak.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

08:39 / 13.12.06

That article made me hulk out and break shit, it was so fucking unscientific and bigoted. Yeah, excessive doses of phytoestrogens are unhealthy, especially in sensitive individuals like infants and children. This is not news. But tying soy consumption into homosexuality? What about all those gay men (Turing springs to mind) who used to get shot full of female hormones as "therapy" for their supposedly overactive sex drives?

Urrgh fuck.

13:28 / 13.12.06

I shan't be reading that link then, but I have to say re:you're also getting substantial quantities of estrogens that even if it were true, it would be miniscule quantities compared to that found in chicken. Female hormone levels in factory farmed birds (to give them big breasts which people then eat) are so high that men handling them in factories have lost hair and sex drive, developed breasts etc. Just from handling the carcasses.

They didn't get queered up though.

13:33 / 13.12.06

I don't believe the hype about soy though, it sounds like scaremongering. A lot of it is GM which might worry some people, but the only bad stuff I've heard is about unfermented soy- once it's made into tofu or whatever it's fine AFAIK.

15:09 / 13.12.06

well some folks I'm pretty sure of suggest soy is a food best consumed after proper fermentation process has had a change to help break it down a bit or it straight up beanpod form.

The way I look at it is you start with a food like corn (maize). Healthy stable item from a well rounded diet and then put it through weird processes and take stuff out and put stuff in and generally poke the crap out of it and you end up with corn syrup, which has to be one of my top most evil things. Evil because the way my body processes the sugar as presented by corn syrup makes me incredibly sick. Or you just feed corn in various forms as the only food but again processed into high weirdness very little resemblence to the fruiting grain pulled off the stalk.

So for me personally there is a vast difference between the tofu floating in my miso and the soy ingrediant floating in my oatmeal cereal.

Having been vegan I can tell you there is a huge difference between consuming protein from less processed foods than from the super crazy modern whizbang products. In my case it was often the weirdo secondary ingrediants and preservatives and hoopla that were the bad guys.

I'm a big fan of tempeh while I avoid modern soy products like most main stream soy burgers and dogs which are filled with other WTF-is-that. I like being to understand my food and pronounce it. My body likes food that can be described as whole food.

As a side note Bovine Growth Hormone is not in all milk, especially organic milk. Milk is sadly another wonderful food (even if it is just from mom to kiddo) that has been twisted up and contorted through our modern food processing.

00:04 / 14.12.06

Female hormone levels in factory farmed birds (to give them big breasts which people then eat) are so high that men handling them in factories have lost hair and sex drive, developed breasts etc. Just from handling the carcasses.

Birds don't have mammary glands, so how is it that female hormones give them big breasts?

04:45 / 14.12.06

Soy is 80% water. Therefore, eating too much soy will cause fluid overload, hypertension, pulmonary congestion and death! There are even some reports of people drowning to death with just half a glass of water!

09:15 / 14.12.06

and remember this?

Leah Betts, the teenager who collapsed after taking an Ecstasy tablet, died as a result of drinking too much water, which made her brain swell.

yet I fail to see what does it have to do with soy.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

14:47 / 14.12.06

Liger Null Birds don't have mammary glands, so how is it that female hormones give them big breasts?

OK, my understanding of biology is laughable but don't hens put on weight while expecting so as to be able to be alive to bring up the chicks once they hatch? And isn't this function in their bodies controlled by hormone release?

16:02 / 14.12.06

Female hormone levels in factory farmed birds (to give them big breasts which people then eat) are so high that men handling them in factories have lost hair and sex drive, developed breasts etc. Just from handling the carcasses.

Why would they be losing their hair as a result of exposure to female hormones? Isn't it male hormones that cause the problem in the first place? If anything (at least unless it's back and chest hair that's been ending up in the shower plug hole - this would seem to be a less alarming prospect than male pattern baldness,) I'd have thought they'd be growing it back.

Hydra vs Leviathan

23:11 / 14.12.06

The chicken breasts thing sounds dodgy to me as well - it's reminiscent of the urban legend about KFC's name change to just its initials being due to the "fact" that the birds it used were too genetically modified to be considered "chickens" (not true - IIRC no GM animal has been approved for human consumption anywhere in the world (yet)), crossed with the one about men working in contraceptive factories (which is scientifically plausible, but i'm not sure if it's actually true)...

Also, loss of head hair in men is caused by male hormones (the most widely used anti-baldness drug is in fact an anti-androgen, which is also used both in gender reassignment and in treatment of mental distress caused by excessive libido), but theoretically they could be talking about loss of androgenic hair, which is the body hair men have where women don't (ie facial hair, chest hair, some percentage of arm and leg hair). Still sounds like someone's got their facts a bit confused tho...

09:09 / 15.12.06

Soy is 80% water. Therefore, eating too much soy will cause fluid overload, hypertension, pulmonary congestion and death! There are even some reports of people drowning to death with just half a glass of water!

Please tell me you're just jesting here.

People don't generally die from eating apples (mostly water) or beef (mostly water) or water (all water). I believe the "drowning in half a glass of water" thing comes from the rare occasions someone inhaled that quantity of fluid into their lungs (pulmonary congestion/edema is caused by swelling of the lungs and/or fluid accumilation).

Yes you probably would die from eating too much soya. Although it would probably have to be a diet where you ate nothing but soya on a constant basis all day every day. Cramming in as much as you could stomach.

12:44 / 15.12.06

Well, the sources I linked actually state this is a common misconception and that the Japanese actually consume an average of about 2 tablespoons of soy per day - more like a condiment than a staple.

I've been living in Japan the last four months or so and people eat a massive amount of the stuff here. They make sauce from it, they pickle stuff in it, they eat the beans raw and (horribly, horribly) fermented, they eat it in delcious tofu form. You get chopped tofu in lots and lots of soups and things and quite often just a large block of it on a plate with some ginger or something.

18:50 / 15.12.06

oh, yum! lagre block of tofu with ginger, spring onions and sweetish soya sauce. i almost forgot about this amazing snack...thanks!

19:51 / 15.12.06

sorry to double post. i work in the health food industry and there is always a huuuuuge debate about soy. as a 98% vegan i know that i eat too much of it, but it's had no ill affects on either my partner or myself.

i agree with xk that it seems to be the ultra processes stuff that people get reactions to...

12:14 / 17.12.06

Yes, High Evilutionary, my entry on water in soybeans is but a jest. Sadly, some were thinking it wasn't. I meant to illustrate a point.
Foodstuff have components. Specific quantities must be ingested to have certain effects. Then again most of the components don't act in isolation. Also, all the processing, including cooking will have changed things again.
Since this thread is Laboratory, I was expecting discussions on the scientific validity of these scaremongering. Experimental studies on mice, or epidemiological studies on populations. Not hypothetical conjecture on component effects.

16:21 / 18.12.06

On the chicken thing, I meant chest hair, beard hair etc. not head hair. Looking up Growth Hormones leads me to believe it may be an urban myth though, I was told of the factory workers feminisation years ago and believed it. Maybe it used to happen, but I don't think it's likely and it doesn't happen any more.
"Despite what you might hear, no artificial or added hormones are used in the production of any poultry in the United States. Food and Drug Administration regulations prohibit the use of such hormones. Any package of chicken labeled "produced without hormones" also should state that no added hormones are used in the production of any poultry example link

So my bad, apologies! I am teh sucker.