Soy: Miracle Food or Bean of Death?

I will admit to feeling a certain spiteful glee in witnessing death of a fad, particularly one that deserves it so desperately. Here's how things seem to work. Some obscure snippet of scientific research tells us about a certain threat to our well being - trans fats or carbohydrates or whatever the dietary whipping boy du jour happens to be. Then people take that and some other obscure snippet of scientific research (and these people practically never cite their sources) that finds some amazing thing that's going to fix everything and make us live forever. And then, through a brilliant marketing strategy, the health food illuminati separate hordes of frightened stupid people from their money. I find this sickening, mostly because I don't get any of the money.

One of the prime examples of this is soy. We've all heard this before - the miracle food from the orient that will make meat (and dairy and egg) obsolete! It will lower your cholesterol! It will prevent you from getting cancer! It will trim your waistline, program your VCR, do your taxes, raise your IQ, mow your lawn, de-fragment your hard drive, find a unified field theory and a realistic plan for world peace! The only objections that people had to soy was the fact that it feels kind of like old Jello, but without the flavor. But millions of people decided to suck it up and eat soy anyway. They did it for their health. They did it for the children. They did it to save all the little cows and pigs and chickens. And guess what? In classic scientific fashion, the findings that made people go soy-crazy have been balanced by counter-findings. In some cases, not only does it not prevent cancer, but soy may actually make it worse. In addition, soy has been linked to severe allergies, malnutrition, digestive problems, thyroid problems, and even sexual dysfunction.

You know those isoflavones that are supposed to be so good for you? What they don't tell you on the soy milk carton is that isoflavones are plant estrogen. It's about 1/1,200 as potent as human estrogen, but I think you see why going on an all-soy diet can mess up your body chemistry - particularly for infants and young children at a critical stage in development where hormone levels can have a dramatic effect on later development. On top of that, soy is full of anti-nutrients that actually interfere with absorption of proteins and minerals. What happened? Haven't Asians been eating tons of the stuff for over 3,000 years? Here's where the irony kicks in: Asians never really ate that much soy, and much of what they did eat was in the form a miso - a fermented soybean paste. The process of fermentation destroys many of the harmful chemicals in soy. Non-fermented soy beans and soy flour were only eaten in times of famine. Tofu was not typically used as a main meal except in monasteries where it was used to suppress the libido!

So, what are we to do with this new knowledge about soy? Jim Rutz of WorldNet Daily takes this tidbit of scientific data and goes wild, suggesting that soy might make you homosexual. This is not responsible science. You simply can not make that kind of leap on the data currently available. (Even though I don't agree with all of his conclusions, you should still check out Rutz's series of articles - his sources are excellent.) Now a stampede of frightened dumb people - the same dumb people that prematurely proclaimed soy to be a miracle food - are now trying to expunge every trace of soy from their diets. If they manage to pull it off, good for them. Life without soy is completely possible. People lived for millennia without touching the stuff. But treating it like poison is a silly thing to do that unnecessarily freaks people out. Even Dr. Kaayla Daniel, author of The Whole Soy Story and one of the leading figures in the anti-soy movement, says it's okay to eat soy occasionally - even modern uber-processed products. What everybody seems to forget about is balance. What is a good thing in moderate amounts can be a very bad thing when it becomes the cornerstone of your entire diet. This is the danger of soy-based infant formulas - they make up the entirety of the infant's diet. Babies are not plants - soy milk is not what they are designed to drink. But for those of us adults, a little bit of soy doesn't hurt.

A lot of people are going to have to swallow a difficult truth: there are no miracle foods. This is related to a bigger difficult truth: we're all going to die. Soy is not going to change that, and neither will anything else. Furthermore, human beings are omnivores - we're built to eat a wide variety of things. Too much of any one thing is probably bad, for us. Each food has an optimum dose - some are larger than others. Even a vitamin can be a poison if you eat too much of it. Are there positive health effects from eating soy? Probably. Are there negative effects from eating too much? Probably. But that same rule applies to any other food. You can all stop hyperventilating now.

Jeez.