Mr Punch
07-25-2006, 04:23 AM
Interesting article here. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/Story/0,,1828158,00.html)
And no, I'm not saying soya is safe, and nor is this article. Quite the opposite. The thread title is just to get your attention! :D And to let you know that there are good soya products out there. There was always something that didn't sit right with me about the whole 'evils of soya' dogma... and that was, how come the Chinese and Japanese (and various other Asian countries) had been eating soya products for centruries and their men hadn't grown breasts or started talking funnily!
And also, was the problem in part due to GM and breeding techniques? The answer appears to be yes.
Well, OK there's a long tradition of okama and cross-dressing actors in both cultures plus the famous samurai prediliction for boys (also overblown)... so seriously, maybe the problem had always been there but it had just been cloaked in some cultural nuance...?
The salient points of this article to me are:
1)
Fitzpatrick, however, looked into historic soya consumption in Japan and China and concluded that Asians did not actually eat that much. What they did eat tended to have been fermented for months. "If you look at people who are into health fads here, they are eating soya steaks and veggie burgers or veggie sausages and drinking soya milk - they are getting over 100g a day. They are eating tonnes of the raw stuff."
...What the committee also pointed out was that the way soya was processed affected the levels of phyto-oestrogens. Traditional fermentation reduces the levels of isoflavones two- to threefold. Modern factory processes do not
2)
Moreover, modern American strains of soya have significantly higher levels of isoflavones than Japanese or Chinese ones because they have been bred to be more resistant to pests. (One way to tackle pests is to stop them breeding by making them infertile. It turns out that unfermented soya did play one role in traditional Asian diets - it was eaten by monks to dampen down their libido.)
Summary:
Modern processed adult soya is bad for all the reasons that have recently been pointed out.
Traditionally processed soya has the health benefits traditionally associated with soya, as the fermentation process reduces isoflavones, anti-enzyme and anti-nutrients.
GM soya is especially bad in that generally the focus is on pest control through increasing hormone imbalance and disruption which does carry over into humans.
And no, I'm not saying soya is safe, and nor is this article. Quite the opposite. The thread title is just to get your attention! :D And to let you know that there are good soya products out there. There was always something that didn't sit right with me about the whole 'evils of soya' dogma... and that was, how come the Chinese and Japanese (and various other Asian countries) had been eating soya products for centruries and their men hadn't grown breasts or started talking funnily!
And also, was the problem in part due to GM and breeding techniques? The answer appears to be yes.
Well, OK there's a long tradition of okama and cross-dressing actors in both cultures plus the famous samurai prediliction for boys (also overblown)... so seriously, maybe the problem had always been there but it had just been cloaked in some cultural nuance...?
The salient points of this article to me are:
1)
Fitzpatrick, however, looked into historic soya consumption in Japan and China and concluded that Asians did not actually eat that much. What they did eat tended to have been fermented for months. "If you look at people who are into health fads here, they are eating soya steaks and veggie burgers or veggie sausages and drinking soya milk - they are getting over 100g a day. They are eating tonnes of the raw stuff."
...What the committee also pointed out was that the way soya was processed affected the levels of phyto-oestrogens. Traditional fermentation reduces the levels of isoflavones two- to threefold. Modern factory processes do not
2)
Moreover, modern American strains of soya have significantly higher levels of isoflavones than Japanese or Chinese ones because they have been bred to be more resistant to pests. (One way to tackle pests is to stop them breeding by making them infertile. It turns out that unfermented soya did play one role in traditional Asian diets - it was eaten by monks to dampen down their libido.)
Summary:
Modern processed adult soya is bad for all the reasons that have recently been pointed out.
Traditionally processed soya has the health benefits traditionally associated with soya, as the fermentation process reduces isoflavones, anti-enzyme and anti-nutrients.
GM soya is especially bad in that generally the focus is on pest control through increasing hormone imbalance and disruption which does carry over into humans.