Would it be better to eat soy than meat? Is soy really good for you? I’ve heard that protein and vitamin b12 from soy arn’t absorbed as good as they are from meat and that non fermented soy is bad. I’ve also heard that soy doesn’t have cholesterol and that just consuming soy and no meat would be dangerous to your health. Can someone please enlighten me?
Just my anecdotal experience: Soy is a migraine trigger for me. If I drank a glass of soy-milk and ate a soy-burger, I’d get a raging migraine headache. Not just a 2-aspirin headache, but a “kill-me-now” type of migraine, where I have to take prescription meds and lie down in a dark room and throw up till it goes away.
Obviously, I try not to eat it. I know there are little bits of soy in lots of things, and little amounts are okay, but larger amounts are bad for me.
Just my two cents worth.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense to approach the question in such a binary way.
If you ate only soy, you’d be ill. If you ate only meat, you’d be ill in a different way. (Although even though I prefer to go veggie, if I had to choose, I’d choose meat, which is a much broader category and provides a wider range of nutrients. This is only if we’re saying “Absolutely no other food allowed,” though. Which is silly.)
There are a lot of ways to prepare soy, and many of them are tasty and great sources of protein. If you cut meat out of your diet altogether, you can’t simply replace it with soy products, though – you may find that you need more fat in your diet. Someone who eats rice and soy and nothing else is going to feel poorly. If you’re going to go veggie, you have to work on a more varied diet.
Soyfoods are great. TVP, tofu, tempeh and other soy products are excellent – but you’ve got to put more effort into preparing them, and they’re just an ingredient – not something to base a meal around. It’s not like a chunk of chicken that you can grill and eat by itself in a pinch.
Anyway, you want to find a diet that’s balanced. Simply replacing all the meat you eat with tofu would probably not be a good thing. It might be, if you were killing yourself with a diet saturated in fat, but were getting varied nutrition from other sources. You’re not going to do yourself a favour if you eat nothing but pasta, tofu, and cheese every day, though. If you don’t have a varied diet, you’re better off to have some meat in there. It’s more “all-purpose” than most foods.
Check into the PER (protein effiency ratio) soy is not as high as meat, eggs, etc. As I recall whey protein is at the top followed by eggs followed by meat. soy is below these, but is still superior to grains and all other vegetables
This is true, but misleading. Cholesterol is produced only by animals, so a non-animal product will contain no cholesterol at all. However, humans can produce cholesterol, too. Most cholesterol in humans is not from dietary cholesterol, but from dietary saturated fats. Soy products can contain fats, including saturated ones, and in fact many soy recipes have more fat than an equivalent meat recipe, to give flavor. So giving up meat will not necessarily have any effect on your cholesterol levels.
Yes, that is misleading. The fat in soybeans is unsaturated, and the most common sources of saturated fats are animal.
Yes, lacto-vegetarians include cheese in their diets, but someone who uses soy-based meat substitutes is going to have less saturated fats in their diet than they would if they didn’t. For instance, a vegetarian lasagna made with textured soy protein instead of ground beef will have saturated fat from the cheese (unless it’s vegan and uses soy cheese) but much less of the additional saturated fat that a carnie lasagna has from the meat.
Or a veggie curry made with soy products may be high in saturated fats owing to the luvverly coconut milk sauce, but it’ll be much lower than it would if it contained beef instead.
I have a hard time imagining how you could engineer a soy recipe that contains more fat than an equivalent meat recipe. Can you name a single soy-based item that has anywhere near the same amount of fat that you’d find in a meat product that you’d substitute with it? Most have no saturated fats at all, and are relatively low in unsaturated fats. Veggie dogs, for example, typically contain between 0 and 15 percent of the fat of regular hot dogs – and it’s all unsaturated, unlike regular dogs. (They’re still as gross as hot dogs, though, so I wouldn’t recommend them. A typical comparison, as far as fatt goes, though.)
I’ve been eating meat again for a year or so after more than a decade of using soy products as a primary source of protein. The main reason for the change is that it was simply taking too much work for me to get enough fat in my diet. If you need to cut down on fat - especially saturated fats - replacing meat with soy products is a great strategy. Just don’t suddenly become a dairy fiend or start frying everything in palm oil, and you’re bound to reduce your intake of saturated fats.