Are Soy Products Harmful?

By David Merson

Walk through the aisles of a health-food store or super market these days and you will find ever-increasing varieties of soy-based products being promoted as healthy alternatives to our traditional diets. But soybeans have long been understood to be toxic for humans, and the way in which they are cultivated on a large scale is now wreaking social and environmental havoc as well. Indeed soybeans are one of the two most heavily used transgenic (GMO) crops in production in Quebec and worldwide, and as such threaten to destabilize the very security of our food supply.

The earliest historical evidence from Asia indicates that, unlike other legumes such as lentils, and grains like rice and wheat, soybeans were not grown as a food crop, but were originally used as a "green manure" to supply nutrients to farmers' fields as part of a crop rotation. Unlike other beans, soy was considered inedible until processes were developed to ferment it, thus reducing its phytic acid content and transforming its nutritive properties.

The first edible soy products were sprouts and fermented foods like tempeh, miso and shoyu (soy sauce). Although these products are available on the market today in Canada, their consumption pales in comparison to foods made from unfermented soy waste products such as textured vegetable protein (TVP). "Health-food" products made from TVP, such as veggie deli slices, contain phytoestrogens, phytates, antinutrients and growth depressant substances. Tofu, unfortunately, is not much better. In the making of tofu (which is not a fermented product), the bean curd is separated from the whey, with the latter absorbing much of the antinutrient enzyme inhibitors, thus reducing but not eliminating their quantity in the tofu. If eaten with meat, as is done in Japan, the mineral-blocking effect of the high levels of phytic acid in tofu is reduced, making tofu a safe food. However, in Canada, tofu is rarely eaten with meat, thus negating its traditional nutritional value. Also of concern is the fact that all non-organic soy-based products, including tofu, are now made from genetically modified organisms, which are increasingly being understood to have detrimental effects on human health and the environment.

So how did soy products suddenly become so common? Soy oil has been in wide use in Canada since the beginning of the processed food revolution in the 1950s, being a major ingredient in margarine and most highly processed and packaged foods, and as interest in processed foods skyrocketed in recent decades so did oil production. However, oil makes up only a small part of the soybean, and there were massive amounts of free protein and carbohydrates in the waste sludge from the oil extrusion process. So in the 1970s, the Archers Daniels Midland corporation ingeniously invented TVP as a way to convince people to pay money for the soy oil waste. The promotion of soy as a healthy food over the last 30 years has been a cynical ploy perpetrated by corporate agribusiness to stimulate the consumption a highly profitable crop. An acre of soy offers high yields of protein, carbohydrates and fat, which made it attractive to food processors and feedlot operators alike. And modern nutritional science, which simplistically valued food primarily on the basis of those three chemicals, was a cheerleader in this effort, condoning soy as a suitable human food.

Recently, though, our theory of food has slowly begun to shift away from chemical nutritional science and back towards the understandings earned by our ancestors over thousands of years of trial and error. As authors like Michael Pollen have pointed out, chemical nutrition theory in cahoots with agribusiness is creating an over-fed yet malnourished society, but the solution to this problem is simple: We just have to go back to the way our grandparents ate.

Sources:

Russell L. Blaylock, Excitotoxins. Health Press, 1996.

Dianne Gregg, The Hidden Dangers of Soy. Outskirts Press, 2008.

Michal Pollen, In Defense of Food. Penguin, 2008.

Ron Schmid, The Untold Story of Milk. New Trends Publishing, 2003.

"The Simple Soya Truth"
http://www.soyonlineservice.co.nz/articles/simple_soya_truth.htm

"Antinutrients- Your Key to Bad Health"
http://paleolithicdiet.wordpress.com/2008/06/22/antinutrients-your-key-to-bad-health/

"Is Soy Healthy?"
http://www.healingdaily.com/detoxification-diet/soy.htm

"The Trouble with Tofu"
http://www.soyonlineservice.co.nz/articles/soya_jola_chudy.pdf