In my non-expert opinion there is a lot of intentional and unintentional anti-soy hysteria. Asians have been eating soy for centuries. A frequent counterpoint made by anti-soy fear mongers is that Asians don’t really use that much soy.
A while back I found a good article debunking much of this counterpoint.
Today, I found a new article by author Virginia Messina R.D. debunking this counterpoint and from a different perspective:
The confusion about how much soy Asians consume is based partly on a simple mathematical misunderstanding. In studies of intake, findings are sometimes expressed as the amount of soy protein that people consume—which is different from the total amount of soy food in their diets. For example, according to surveys in Japan, older adults consume around 10 grams of soy protein per day, which is the amount of protein in about 1 to 1 ½ servings of traditional soyfoods. Because a number of authors have misunderstood the relationship between soy protein and soyfood, they’ve greatly underestimated the amount of soy in Japanese diets.
One question I always ask is “how do you know what Asian’s eat?”. Seriously, China alone has about a billion people. Do Americans eat a lot of potatoes? Yes, many Americans do, but a large number of Americans probably never touch the things. The population of the U.S. is about 300 million people. Asia consists of a large number of countries, cultures and people. They aren’t all going to be the same,so I am suspicious of the “Asians don’t eat a lot of soy” point:
The results show a fairly wide range of intake among different countries and even within populations. While average Japanese intake is 1 to 1 ½ servings, the surveys reveal that the upper range among older Japanese—who would be expected to eat a more traditional diet—is about 3 servings of soyfoods per day.
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