Small Steps to Health

Is Soy Good for You? - Part 1

November 6th, 2008 by asithi · 4 Comments

Tagged Healthy Eating, food marketing, healthy eating, soy, Supplements

Photo by:  Chrys Omori.

This is a two part series discussing the marketing of soy, the soy controversy (including the estrogen factor), how Chinese families generally eat soy, and who should probably not eat soy.

My family and I stopped by a diner for lunch when we were in Santa Cruz last year. All of us ordered either a hamburger or a cheeseburger.

As we were giving our order to the server, she asked us if we wanted “patties that taste like beef?”

“Yes, we want beef patties,” my brother answered.

All of us happily digged into our food with it arrived, passing the ketchup bottle around for the fries. After a few bites, we were staring at each other with a puzzle look on our face. The patties tasted funny. Laughing at the looks on our faces, my amused sister’s part-time vegetarian boyfriend announced that we were eating “tofu burgers.”

You would think that as a traditional Chinese family that we would know the taste of soy like the back on our hands. Unfortunately that is not the case.

Marketing of Soy Based Food Products

American farmers harvest about 145 billion pounds of soybeans a year (approximately a third of the global supply of soybeans). After export, 87 billion pounds are left for domestic use. Even though most of the soybeans are used as livestock feed, domestic processing still leaves 25 billion pounds of solids (meal) and fat (oil) for human consumption. The food manufacturers are eager to get us to buy this excess supply of soybeans, especially the “fake” soy products.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the food industry’s normal mode of practice is to encourage us to eat more, not less. And we all know that health claims sale products in this country. Some people want to believe that they can eat their hearty breakfast of bacon, hash browns, eggs, and toast without worry of heart disease or high cholesterol as last long as they drink their soy milk with the meal.

Is Soy Good for You?

The soy controversy centers around the two factors that might affect our health – proteins and isoflavones (soybean’s pytochemical that behave like a weak versions of estrogen in our bodies).

Soybeans contain nutrients found in most legume, pea, or bean. Soybeans are higher in calories, protein, and fat than kidney beans, but lower in carbohydrate and fiber. Like meat, soybeans are considered a “complete protein,” meaning it contain contains all of the essential amino acids needed for human nutrition. Other plant based protein lack at least one amino acid.

25 grams of daily soy protein can lower total cholesterol by 1% since it reduced LDL (the “bad” cholesterol) up to 10%. There is strong scientific evidence supporting the lowering cholesterol claim of soy beans. Here is a pretty good article from the Mayo Clinic listing soy’s health claims and the amount of scientific support for each claim.

25 grams of soy protein is a lot! That is equivalent to 2 tofu burgers or 2.5 8-ounce glass of soy milk or 8 ounces of tofu. How many Chinese people do you know eat 8 ounces of tofu a day?

But 25 grams of soy protein means we must be eating a lot of soy isoflavones ?  How does having this estrogen like chemical in our bodies impact our health?  That will the topic of discussion in the 2nd part of this series.

Until next time and thanks for stopping by Small Steps to Health.

« Previous - American Heart Association Endorsement Not to be Trusted! | Next - Is Soy Isoflavones Good for You? - Part 2 »

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• Is Soy Isoflavones Good for You? - Part 2
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