Page 2
Fall 2009
Because I spent the ma-
jority of my life as a vegetarian
and because protein-dense soy
foods such as tofu were stereo-
typical staples of the 1990’s
vegetarian diet, I vividly re-
member a time in which the
people who thought consuming
soy was detrimental to your
health were the same people
who fervidly used the words
“Zionist” and “illuminati” more
than once a day, invested the
bulk of their income in gold and
homemade napalm, and thought
the mass suicides orchestrated
by Rev. Jim Jones were the re-
sults of a government experi-
ment in mind control. This time
was not very long ago.
Last year, while preparing a
speech to instruct people how to
maintain a healthy vegetarian
diet, a quick Google search for
“soy” persuaded me to humbly
withhold mention of the newly
controversial food. Though I
was still very skeptical as to the
amount of sound and congruent
logic used by the paranoid web-
masters to arrive at their deci-
sions to condemn and com-
pletely ban soy from their diets,
I decided to risk erring on the
side of caution by heeding their
poorly-articulated warnings of
soy phytoestrogens making
male babies turn gay and grow
breasts. At this time, the seem-
ingly logical reasons to avoid
soy that were accessible to the
general, computer owning pub-
lic, came from a few insuffi-
ciently documented case studies
_.- often first-hand accounts
posted by female vegans on
internet forums suggesting that
their regular consumption of
gratuitous amounts of soy
caused them menstrual irregu-
ume was widely hailed as a
heart-healthy,
suppressing, low fat source of
protein, iron, calcium, and
oddly, vitamin B12.
Today however, a Google
search for “soy” will yield
countless webpage results fea-
turing articles written by people
with PH.D.s, claiming that the
consumption of soy promotes
brain atrophy and breast cancer,
in addition to menstrual irregu-
larity, and citing timely research
to back up their claims. It has
been noted by dietitians that the
acute levels of the antinutrient
phytic acid in soy foods can in-
hibit absorption of the essential
dietary minerals zinc, iron, cop-
per, and magnesium. Plant es-
trogens, or “phytoestrogens,”
which can similarly be found in
great abundance within soy, in-
terfere with the estrogen recep-
tors in our bodies, and are now
commonly believed to be
for tumor growth, male infertil-
ity, and hypothyroidism. Also,
SOY
foods produced in the United
with aluminum, the consump-
tion of which has long been
shown to be correlated with
Alzheimer’s disease.
The fact that, in my lifetime,
popular science has went from
declaring such a commonly
used ingredient ambrosia for
mortals, to deeming it the die-
tary equivalent of anthrax is dis-
enfranchising, and speaks vol-
umes about the pithiness of our
knowledge of the scientific dis-
cipline that is seemingly most
essential for the preservation of
life: nutrition. The fact that the
majority of Americans (three
out of four) still think soy is a
health food speaks testaments of
the effectiveness of marketing,
the apathy we have towards our
health, and our general igno-
rance of contemporary scientific
finds and trends.
It’s easy to believe that the
ongoing, yet recently one-sided
debate over the safety of soy is
only pertinent to vegetarians,
vegans, and the lactose intoler-
ant, as no omnivore with the
ability to metabolize lactose or
obtain 40-50 grams of protein a
day without the aid of dietary
supplements would subject her-
self to the very subtle, yet cringe
-inducing taste of tofu or soy-
milk by her own leave. Rather,
just as our nation’s infrastruc-
ture was built on the assumption
that gasoline would always be
cheap and plentiful, it seems
that the modern diet was built
on the assumption that soy is a
healthy food, or at least will al-
ways be widely regarded as a
healthy food. To realize this,
next time you go grocery shop-
ping, pretend you have an ex-
tremely sensitive case of soy-
bean allergy that prohibits you
from ingesting even trace
amounts of soy-derived ingredi-
ents. Doing this, I found it im-
possible (not extremely diffi-
cult, but impossible) to find a
brand-name loaf of bread in the
Chambersburg Wal-Mart that
did not contain soybean oil, soy
dough, or soy lecithin. Simi-
larly, I found it extremely diffi-
cult to find any product within
the store in which cocoa and soy
didn’t coincide. According to
Dianne Gregg, champion of the
soy-free diet and author of the
recently published book The
Hidden Dangers of Soy, over
60% of foods on supermarket
shelves contain soy-derived in-
gredients. To make things
worse, many of these soy-
derived ingredients can slip un-
der the radars of even the most
thorough label-readers, for com-
panies may list these ingredients
using vague terms such as
“stabilizers,” “emulsifiers,” or
“natural flavors” without speci-
fying origin to hide the presence