Is soy milk/ soy based products bad for you?!
Answers: Hey there, so I just turned into a vegetarian, i was wondering, is soy milk bad for you? I've heard it was a good alternitave to regular milk, but lately i've been hearing it's bad for you to eat it? Is this true?
Soy is a great source of calcium and protein. However, yes, eating a lot can cause excess estrogen hormones in your body. What I recommend is adding flax seed to your diet. Lignins help flush excess estrogen from your body. They're easy to get from flax seeds -- just sprinkle them on just about anything you eat, and besides, omega-3s (from the flax) are brain food and also a mood elevator.
you "turned" into a vegetarian?!? Although I commend your healthier lifestyle choice, You should've done a little more research about it. Do you just buy the first car you see because it's part of a fad, or do you at least find out if it's a good car? If soy were bad for you, don't you think that there would've been HUGE newscasts touting the detrimental effects!?!? Soy is a natural product that offers a healthy source of protien. If it were bad for you, then EVERYTHING we eat from McDonald's as well as other fast foods, would have killed millions every year. As it stands, only sedentary lifestyles, poor eating habits, and lazy american attitudes insisting on circling the parking lots looking for the very closest spot to the door so they don't have to walk very far to the motorized shopping cart are the main thing that kills people.
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I think it is the greatest, I have chocolate or strawberry soy milk on my cereal all the time. Soy also helps to lower your cholesterol and is a good source of protein and calcium.
Go for it !!
Soy in moderation can be very good for you. If you however consume too much of it it can cause problems. Soy can cause an increase in the hormone estrogen.
I suggest instead of avoiding soy products all together, as they can be very useful for vegetarian and vegans, to include a variety of other products into you diet. For example there is not just soy milk but almond, oat, hemp, rice, multi grain, etc as well. There are also rice yogurts and cheeses. The key to a healthy diet is a well balanced diet. You are already limiting your variety by cutting out meats so why make it harder on yourself unless you have a known allergy?
It is true however that in general the less processed foods you can consume the better. This unfortunately can be difficult acquire the know how as well as maintaining the lifestyle. But if you really feel motivated by all means. There are raw foodists out there that live and espouse such benefits. But for the majority of us including most vegans a little soy milk here and there can go a long way.
I'm so happy you are a vegetarian now! Congrats.
No soya milk is bad for you. It's very healthy.
It DOES have trace amounts of a hormone that mimics estrogen but there are no worries that it will damage health.
Soya milk provides you with Good quality protein, and Omega 3 and 6. The Omegas help give you good skin. Just a random fact for you there.
Scottie x
Soy milk can be bad for you if drank in excess. Just like everything else soy milk is fine if it iconsumed in moderation. Estrogen is a hormone and it is in soy milk. Too much estrogen has been linked to breast cancer.
no appartly its good for you
Hi there! Congrats on your choice.
Soy is good for you. The problem is the same ol problem America always has. "If a little is good then more must be better." Which isn't true.
America has put soy in just about everything. Which has us consuming toxic levels.
Add to that the instability of genetically engineered organisms. The so-called "Round Up Ready" soy which is used so highly in the US - is very bad for us. It's this round up ready soy that is causing all these problems.
So too, we are not consuming soy in a pure state. We are loading it up with all sorts of garbage and making unnatural soy products. These are very problematic.
You see, most of the so called problems with soy are from genetically engineered soy and highly processed soy products.
Soy milk, tempeh and tofu are not highly processed so they are ok.
But still - It's better to vary your intake. Use soy milk for awhile, then switch to rice milk, grain milk, almond milk or hemp milk. They each have nutrients you need.
For Dr Mike Fitzpatrick, the saga of soya began in Monty Python-style with a dead parrot. His investigations into the ubiquitous bean started in 1991 when Richard James, a multimillionaire American lawyer, turned up at the laboratory in New Zealand where Fitzpatrick was working as a consultant toxicologist. James was sure that soya beans were killing his rare birds.
"We thought he was mad, but he had a lot of money and wanted us to find out what was going on," Fitzpatrick recalls
Over the next months, Fitzpatrick carried out an exhaustive study of soya and its effects. "We discovered quite quickly," he recalls, "that soya contains toxins and plant oestrogens powerful enough to disrupt women's menstrual cycles in experiments. It also appeared damaging to the thyroid." James's lobbying eventually forced governments to investigate. In 2002, the British government's expert committee on the toxicity of food (CoT) published the results of its inquiry into the safety of plant oestrogens, mainly from soya proteins, in modern food. It concluded that in general the health benefits claimed for soya were not supported by clear evidence and judged that there could be risks from high levels of consumption for certain age groups. Yet little has happened to curb soya's growth since.
More than 60% of all processed food in Britain today contains soya in some form, according to food industry estimates. It is in breakfast cereals, cereal bars and biscuits, cheeses, cakes, dairy desserts, gravies, noodles, pastries, soups, sausage casings, sauces and sandwich spreads. Soya, crushed, separated and refined into its different parts, can appear on food labels as soya flour, hydrolysed vegetable protein, soy protein isolate, protein concentrate, textured vegetable protein, vegetable oil (simple, fully, or partially hydrogenated), plant sterols, or the emulsifier lecithin. Its many guises hint at its value to manufacturers.
Soya increases the protein content of processed meat products. It replaces them altogether in vegetarian foods. It stops industrial breads shrinking. It makes cakes hold on to their water. It helps manufacturers mix water into oil. Hydrogenated, its oil is used to deep-fry fast food.
Soya is also in cat food and dog food. But above all it is used in agricultural feeds for intensive chicken, beef, dairy, pig and fish farming. Soya protein - which accounts for 35% of the raw bean - is what has made the global factory farming of livestock for cheap meat a possibility. Soya oil - high in omega 6 fatty acids and 18% of the whole bean - has meanwhile driven the postwar explosion in snack foods around the world. Crisps, confectionery, deep-fried take-aways, ready meals, ice-creams, mayonnaise and margarines all make liberal use of it. Its widespread presence is one of the reasons our balance of omega 3 to omega 6 essential fatty acids is so out of kilter.
You may think that when you order a skinny soya latte, you are choosing a commodity blessed with an unadulterated aura of health. But soya today is in fact associated with patterns of food consumption that have been linked to diet-related diseases. And 50 years ago it was not eaten in the west in any quantity.
In 1965, the earliest year for which the Chicago Board of Trade keeps figures, global soya bean production was just 30m tonnes. By 2005, the world was consuming nine times that a year, at 270m tonnes. World soya oil production, meanwhile, has increased sevenfold over the same period, from 5m tonnes to 34m tonnes a year.
To feed demand, new agricultural frontiers are being opened up in Brazil, where large areas of virgin rainforest have been illegally felled to make room for the crop. US-based transnationals are now exporting soya back to China, the country from which it originated, as newly urbanised Chinese switch to industrialised western diets. Thanks to US agribusiness, we have developed an apparently insatiable global appetite for the bean produced by farmers in the Americas.
James and Fitzpatrick became convinced early on that this entirely new dependence on soya was, in fact, a dangerous experiment. The dead parrots were no joke - they were the canaries in the coalmine.
For James and his wife Valerie, breeding the exotic birds down under was a retirement dream. They wanted to feed their young birds the best, so they began giving the chicks a soya feed. Parrots do not eat soya beans in the wild but the high-protein animal feed had been marketed in the US as a new miracle food.
The result was a catastrophic breeding year. Some of the birds were infertile; many died. Other young male birds aged prematurely or reached puberty years early. "We realised there was some sort of hormonal disruption going on but we'd eliminated other possible hormone disrupting chemicals such as pesticides from the inquiry," Fitzpatrick says.
So the toxicologist began a systematic review of the scientific literature on soya. After finding out about the plant oestrogens in soya, Fitzpatrick says, "My next thought was: what about children who are fed soya milk?" He calculated that babies fed exclusively on soya formula could receive the oestrogenic equivalent, based on body weight, of five birth control pills a day.
In fact, it had been known since the early 1980s that plant oestrogens, or phyto-oestrogens, could produce biological effects in humans. The most common of these were a group of compounds in soya protein called isoflavones. Food manufacturers had variously marketed soya foods as an antidote to menopausal hot flushes and osteoporosis, and as a protective ingredient against cardiovascular disease and hormone-related cancers. Large quantities of mainly industry-sponsored scientific research have been produced to back up these claims. The American soya industry spends about $80m every year, raised from a mandatory levy on producers, to research and promote the consumption of soya around the world. The rash of new soya foods can be seen as the latest in a line of innovative ways devised to use soya.
The hypothesis behind the health claims is that rates of heart disease and certain cancers such as breast and prostate cancer are lower in east Asian populations with soya-rich diets than in western countries, and that the oestrogens in soya might therefore have a protective effect.
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."
Mass exposure to isoflavones in the west has only occurred in the past 30 years due to the widespread incorporation of soya protein into processed foods, a fact noted by the Royal Society in its expert report on Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals in 2000. When the independent experts on the scientific committee on toxicity trawled through all the scientific data, they concluded that soya milk should not be recommended for infants even when they had cow's milk allergies, except on medical advice, because of the high levels of oestrogenic isoflavones it contains.
On breast cancer, they decided that "despite the suggested benefits of phyto-oestrogens in lowering risk of developing breast cancer, there is also evidence that they may stimulate the progression of the disease". The lower risk of certain cancers among Asian populations might be due to other factors - their high consumption of fish, for example. They advised caution. On the effects on menopause symptoms, the evidence was inconclusive, the experts ruled. On bone density, the committee thought there might be some protective effects, but the data was unclear. The evidence on prostate cancer was mixed. Since isoflavones cross the placenta, the implications of pregnant women eating large quantities of soya were unclear. There was some evidence that soya-based products had a beneficial effect on the good HDL cholesterol but they were not sure that was down to the isoflavones. On the other hand - reassuringly - they judged that a study linking soya consumption to decline in cognitive function was not convincing.
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. 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.)
Sue Dibb, now food policy expert at the National Consumer Council, was a member of the CoT working group that compiled the final report. She questions whether infant soya milk should still be on public sale and is troubled by the latest marketing of soya. "We looked in detail at the claimed health benefits for adults for soya consumption and concluded there was not sufficient evidence to support many of them. There may be benefits but there are also risks. The groups of adults of particular concern are those with a thyroid problem and women with oestrogen-dependent breast cancer. It worries me that soya is being pushed as a health food by a big soya and supplements industry. We ought to be taking a more cautious approach."
The Food Standards Agency advice is that soya's potential to have an adverse effect on babies' hormonal development is still controversial, but that soya form
Well, it has hormones in it. so I stopped drinking it.