Ever since I became a vegetarian 30 years ago I have heard anti-soy astroturfing. Lets face it, increased soy consumption by people in the U.S. threatens big money: the dairy and livestock industries.
The majority of adult human beings are lactose intolerant. Soy milk tastes good, causes none of the distress of cows milk and is conveniently available in many supermarkets.
There are many tasty foods made out of soy beans.
Soy beans are cheap and extremely nutritious. One cup of cooked soy beans has almost 30 grams of protein, 49% of the DV for iron, 18% of the DV for calcium, 13% of the DV for zinc and 18% of the DV for selenium( nutritiondata.com). Organic soy beans only cost a little bit over $1 a pound. Soy beans can be cooked with a pressure cooker in about 20 minutes. The appearance, texture and taste is similar to navy beans. Now you can understand why the livestock industry feels threatened. Incredible nutrition, high digestibility and low price.
Aside from the financial interests of the animal agriculture sector in the U.S. there have always been alternative food cultists who love to make up modern folk tales about food. Soy is a favorite target of this group and it has only gotten worse with the advent of the internet.
However, the internet can be used to push back against misinformation. That is what happened this week.
Jack Norris, R.D., cofounder of Vegan Outreach, updated his research based article Another Internet Soy Article that debunks a number of anti-soy myths in a brief format.
I really like this quote:
Dear Jack,
I read on the Internet that soy is bad for you. Is this true?I’m kidding about the above intro question because it implies that not everyone has seen articles on the Internet about how bad soy is for you. If I had a nickel for every time someone said something like that to me…
There are at least 30 – 40 scientific papers on soy published each month. If you do a search on PubMed, you will find almost 7,000 papers with “soy” in the title and over 19,000 with soy in the abstract. So, it would be quite easy to build a false case against soy by citing a handful of these thousands of studies.
To sum up the research on humans, the bulk of the evidence indicates that 2 to 3 servings of soy is perfectly safe, possibly even protective against disease. A serving of soy is 1/2 cup of tofu, tempeh, soybeans or textured vegetable protein, or 1 cup of soymilk.
The Vegetarian and Vegan Foundation also introduced their own research based, anti-soy myth debunking site called The Safety Of Soya
I’m looking forward to reading every last word of these two free online resources.