I have still not looked that deeply into soy, but public opinion seems to be split on it, so I keep my intake rather low to hedge my bets until I can figure it out. Being the cynic that I am, it’s hard for me to believe anything, and, in fact, I really don’t put my faith 100% anywhere, so it takes me a while to get a handle on some concepts, especially one with such a diversity of opinions, all with, of course, scientific evidence to back them up.
I used to drink a lot of soymilk, but a few years ago my friend Hans told me how much better almond milk was for me — he was buying into anti-soy rhetoric, which, as I said, may indeed be valid, but I just don’t know. Anyway, I tried almond milk and immediately switched, primarily because almond milk just tastes a lot better than soy milk.
Outside soy milk, which I used in my breakfast cereal and protein shakes, I didn’t really eat soy, except for soy sauce sometimes, and a little tofu here and there from Pei Wei, which has the best tasting tofu, I think, although I cannot to speak to its nutritional value ;=)
Well, that was then, and this is now. Then I was consuming a lot of animal protein. Now I am eating mostly vegan, so I need my plant-based protein, and soy products like tempeh, tofu, and edamame are really good sources of it. I mean, soy is eaten by a large percentage of the world’s population, so my cynicism tells me that most of the anti-soy rap has been generated by the meat industry, which sees soy as stiff competition.
Soy or no soy, well, life doesn’t really boil down to that, now does it? I mean, how can we possibly know what one particular ingredient does to our bodies? There is simply too much going on inside for one ingredient to be “the one thing” that will either kill or cure us, right?
I fact, I am at the point where I cannot even continue to demonize sugar, because there is a lot of sugar in the good fruits we should eat. Okay, maybe refined sugars and flours are bad for us, but perhaps that is simply a problem of volume, and if we only ate a little of that stuff, we’d be fine, right?
Ultimately, it’s virtually impossible to know the answers. The body interacts with the nutrients we ingest in so many ways, there are too many factors to determine what a particular ingredient does inside us. We have a hard time knowing whether it ever makes it to where it needs to be, or whether it has the opportunity to do the damage or uplift the health the way researchers claim it can do.
So what I currently do is strive to eat a lot of plants, and even, on rare occasions, some fish or eggs, and that should be me as close to “okay” as I can get. That’s my take on it for today, anyway. As you may have noticed, I am always open to change, if the right evidence comes along.
But I’ll tell you, I’ve been through a lot up to now, and a whole foods plant-based diet, including soy, seems right.