For a while, we kept seeing news reports as to how soy was the next wonder food, full of vegetarian nutritional goodness and usable in a myriad of tastes and textures. Recently, however, we’ve been seeing the exact opposite kind of reports, as to how soy is poison disguised as food, harmful for the immune system, reproductive system, digestive system, the brain, and on and on.
Can someone with some kind of relevant degree put all this information together and pronounce just how harmful soy is, if at all.
As someone with a BA cum laude Double Major in Journalism and Communication Studies, I can safely tell you that at least 10% of everything you see during a news program concerning science and medicine is dead wrong-- and the rest is exaggerated. (Some days it’s 25%, and others it’s 50%, but I’m being safe here.)
As a science fan married to a scientist (and I’ve been living at research universities for the past 7 years), this infuriates me, but the people who insist on having medical stories during the evening news are the last people who should be telling these stories. (And don’t assume that because the ‘presenter’ is a doctor they know what they’re talking about. I figure if they were good doctors, they’d be practising somewhere.) However, medical news has become a ‘beat’, just like politics or business, and so the incentive is to produce some sort of medical news every single day, even though scientific advancement takes place on a much slower timeline.
The end result is a study involving 10 people with no control subjects funded by a special interest group gets the same amount of airtime (and the same ‘weight’ in the mind of the general public) as a double-blind study involving 15,000 subjects over 20 years. It’s ludicrous, stupid, deceitful, and just plain does a disservice to the public.
No cites right now, but from what I’ve seen, soy is good for you in relatively small doses, especially if it’s unprocessed. It’s when you start eating a lot of it, and in highly processed forms, that it’s safety becomes questionable. Note that there’s no compelling evidence that soy can be dangerous at this point; rather, there’s just enough to be concerned.
There are restrictions for people with certain diseases and conditions (thyroid problems, etc), but all in all, it seems that the evidence is strongly for soy.