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The "Soy" article in this issue's 'Mothering'

post #1 of 127
Thread Starter 
Have y'all read it?

Any educated responses to it? It has certainly made me rethink giving soy to my family except in very limited amounts. I don't have time to comment further on my initial reaction to this article. I haven't researched its sources yet either but just wondered if others had read it.
post #2 of 127
i dont get mothering mag... so i havent read it at all..
post #3 of 127


I haven't received my magazine yet. But there is controversary over consuming large amounts of soy that I do know about. Usual either surrounding the idea that most soybeans are gmo OR the hormonal effects of soy. Either way, I've read many articles supporting both positives and negatives. I myself have PCOS and once I limited my soy intake I was able to conceive within a few months after trying for MANY months. I think soy only becomes a problem when it is over eaten. SOme folks will drink it, use it as their main protein source and even induldge in soy desserts- every day... obviously that's not good. But, in small amounts, even daily in small amounts, it's my families opinion that soy is very beneficial.

post #4 of 127
Thread Starter 
Well I guess I'll have to wait till everyone's read it. It's real eye-popper tho. It was taken from a book about the same subject. I'll be interested to hear what everyone thinks.
post #5 of 127
can you give a biref synopsis? i don't get the magazine
post #6 of 127
What was the name of the book?

I dont get the mag either. i just read it online, so i'm always a little behind. I wish we had money in the budget for reading material.

We dont do much soy around here. I have a bit of tofu in the fridge bc ds asked for it. I figure a little bit of tofu isnt going to do a lot of damage, and it's sure as he!! a lot healthier than giving him potato chips or ice cream as a treat.

I think the fermented soys are supposed to be a lot healthier too, arent they?
post #7 of 127
I have not yet gotten my issue of Mothering so I've not read the article yet.

I have also heard that soy can effect your fertility..seems there was an article put out a couple years back.

Anyone know where I can read more about soy consumption related to fertility?
post #8 of 127
As a vegan, here's my two cents - I haven't read the article in Mothering but I've read many others and my DH spent some time lately reading a bunch from reputable sources (Not Weston-Price) which didn't have any chance of being pro-meat. We've changed out diet as a result.

$.01 - Take care to look at the funding and background of most anti-soy articles and material. Most come from the dairy or cattle industry or from those promoting eating meat.

$.02 - People at the forefront of vegan nutrition and animal rights have made sure to point out that overconsuming any one food can be bad for you, and since soy has been eaten by humans for a relatively short time, we would be wise to limit our intake to a few times a week.

I'm not pro or anti soy. But I refuse to eat animals. So we've gone through our diet (spurred by DH) and noticed that there were days in which, as another poster mentioned, we ate WAY more soy than we would have eaten any other food. So I've cut back and we're eating other kinds of beans and nuts instead, I use much more rice milk instead of soy milk, and we actually pay attention to how much we've eaten that week. I know that soy, just like milk did for me, gives me gas, and I feel better when I've had less. But I'm not cutting it out altogether, just making sure I don't overdo it. That seems wise with all forms of food.

post #9 of 127

Need a vegan's help with this!

Ok, someone (preferrably a vegan someone - Erin Pavlina... where are you?!) talk me off of the edge here ... I have been a vegan for almost 6 years now - it all started with ds's severe dairy- and egg-allergies, but we are vegan now for ethical, humane and sustainable-earth reasons too. We are healthier now than we have ever been and I can say this without any caveats.

*But* this article is super scary. The average Asian person in China, Taiwan, Vietnam...etc. etc. (according to the article) consumes no more than 30-something gms of soy per day. Compare that to the average amount of soy in one cup of soymilk (220-something). We do way more than that - every day.

At least a cup of soy milk w/ breakfast, soy milk in our hot beverages troughout the day, soy yogurt every day, sometimes tofu for dinner, tempeh less often and occasionally a soy burger, sausage or frozen desert. My kids (ds aged 6 and dd 22 months) despise legumes. Will eat nuts in only very moderate amounts (ds is allergic to peanuts). Certainly not enough to sustain a healthy growing body.

I try to make seitan from scratch often, disguise legumes where I can in sauces, hummus and spreads, but the truth is, soy (tofu, soy milk and yogurt mostly) is an often-used staple in our house for my fussy-eating kids.

Rice-milk seems to me (and I may be wrong) a nutritionally defiicient alternative and loaded with sugar to boot. Almond milk, ditto (at least as far as protein and sugar goes).

I have always prided myself on cooking from scratch, whole-food healthful meals, but now I have the wind completely taken out of my sails and want to just sit here and sob.
Can anyone give me some uplifting information?

Feeling totally overwhelmed now....

Michelle in sunny NY
post #10 of 127
Michelle1K - I'm right there with you. We all, but especially my 5 y.o. dd, consume (apparently large !?!?) amounts of soy daily when you add the soymilk, tofu, etc.

I also have the same concerns about rice and almond milk.

I am now very concerned. Revamping our diet will be almost as major as when we gave up meat in '91!

post #11 of 127

I'd be suspicious....

As was mentioned previously, the dairy and egg industries have much to gain by disseminating false or misleading information about soy. But the numbers don't sound right either. First of all, I'm Asian, and there are billions of us. We eat lots of soy. And we've been eating soy for a long, long time. If it were really bad for you, I don't think there would be billions of us. Unless it's only bad for non-Asians, which I doubt. Only 30g of soy per day? Maybe more, because we eat lots of tofu. And things like edamame, soy sauce, etc., which are all soy-based. Fears of plant estrogen? Well, I'm a man, and I haven't started lactating. I have two kids, so I consider myself virile enough, and my testes haven't shriveled up. And maybe a little plant estrogen can help me stay in touch with my "feminine" side. And 220g of soy in a cup of soy milk? That doesn't sound right at all. We make soy milk all the time with our soy milk maker (bought one from soymilkmaker.com), and we use maybe a 1/2 cup of dry soy beans to make an entire quart. That doesn't sound like 220g per serving. And people keep talking about how soy is such a new thing. But haven't Asians been eating soy for centuries?

post #12 of 127
If the article was published by Mothering, I think it's safe to assume it wasn't funded by the meat or dairy industry. You could look at the author's bibliography and research HER sources, I suppose.

I was truly convinced of the evils of dairy for a while and switched to soy milk. When I got pg, I couldn't tolerate it and went back to dairy. Someone could have written a similar article about cow's milk.

In fact, someone could write a similar article about beef, chicken, fish, or apples for that matter if you eat a lot of them. But I do agree that soy is ultra-pervasive in vegetarian and low-carb foods, so you're getting way more of it than you may realize, which is probably not good.
post #13 of 127

Don't believe everything you read

I've been a Mothering fan for over twelve years, even though I'm only expecting my first child this coming August. Yet after reading this article, and some of the others in the current issue, I'm wondering if it's the magazine that's changed or me. Maybe twelve years ago, I was as strident a know-it-all as many of the writers in this issue. That's not to say that they're necessarily wrong about their ideas. But I notice an underlying theme of underlying paranoia, self-righteousness, and fuzzy-headedness that makes me wonder about the magazine's editorial focus.

For example, in an otherwise compelling, reasoned, and well-documented article on medical marijuana for severe morning sickness, the author claims that only a "perverse federal bureaucrat" could disagree with her. What is she, a Branch Davidian?

But the soy article takes the Most Dubious award in my personal sweepstakes. Written by a Certified Clinical Nutritionist, it's heavily footnoted (100+ footnotes). At the end of the footnote, there's a link to the endnotes at Mothering Magazine's website. A link that doesn't work. I'm sure they'll fix it eventually.

The author has a PhD "in Nutritional Sciences and Anti-Aging Therapies" from an accredited distance-learning University in Cincinnati. This University prides itself in providing people with the freedom to design their own interdisciplinary PhD (and other) degrees. A recent accreditation review ordered unspecified changes to the University's doctoral programs. (http://www.tui.edu/prospective/notice.asp?strLink=Bb.8) A recent position paper by a panel of 51 leading aging researchers claims, basically, that anti-aging therapies are snake oil. Read it for yourself at http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?art...A8809EC588EEDF

The author of the article claims elsewhere (http://www.t-mag.com/nation_articles/302poison.jsp) that the prevalence of soy in the American diet is the result of soy industry manipulations. She doesn't seem to have anything to say about the huge body of research evidence regarding the positive health effects of dietary soy.

The article's tone is so over-the-top, and so one-sided, that I can't help suspecting that the author is a person on a crusade. (Something I think I see a lot of in this issue of Mothering, anyway.) To me, the article reads like a remake of Reefer Madness, with a different evil weed in the starring role. And the way it is written makes me more, rather than less, suspicious of the author's methods.


This statement is a logical fallacy so old it has a Latin name (Post hoc ergo propter hoc; after this, therefore because of this). It's also short on detail. The author doesn't say what "years" are in question. It's easy to read this statement as cause-and-effect, yet the author doesn't make that claim, does she? Notice that she does not say that there is a link between soy formula and these "reported" (any guesses what that means?) phenomena. Presumably if there had been a real association in the published research, she would have said so.Or rather, trumpeted so. What other things have occurred during those sinister years since soy milk came along to poison us all? Nuclear bomb tests? Pesticides, plastics, and pharmaceuticals in drinking water? Aspartame? Increased per capita caffeine consumption? Elevated mercury in fish? Type II diabetes in children under 6? More TV violence?

And the addition of the technical term for undescended testicles, cryptorchidism, adds nothing to the text but vaguely medical sheen. Hm, we're supposed to think, the author used a big word, so she must know what's she's talking about. What I think is, Hm, the author used a big word redundantly. I wonder why.

Yet another new vocabulary word, extruder, right next to the scary, un-"natural" words machine, extreme heat and pressure, industrial, and plastic. An extruder is simply something that shoves stuff through a hole. Remember those Play-Do presses? Pasta machines? Cookie presses? Pastry tubes? Extruders, all. She might as well have said, "Pasta is made by forcing wet flour, mixed with sodium chloride and raw eggs (a known cause of salmonella contamination), through a machine that utilizes extrusion technology, the same basic process used to make razor wire, fuel rods for nuclear reactors, and synthetic petro-pharmaceuticals." Go feed that to your baby.

And also, "The very structure of the soy protein is changed? Please. Does she mean "very" as in, "our very way of life is threatened, under our very noses"; that kind of "very"? Lots of things change the very structure of proteins. Cooking it. Dissolving it in water. Drying it. Digesting it doesn't just change the structure; digestion utterly destroys the structure. Frying an egg changes the structure (excuse me, the very structure) of the protein, irreversibly. A PhD in nutrition knows better, and if she meant something specific, you'd think she'd have said so.

The author may or may not be right about her thesis. The science she's pointing to may be good. But the way the point is presented pegs the needle on my bullshit-meter. And good science, and this is my point, doesn't need dishonest rhetorical tricks.

I'm looking forward to going through some of the sources for this article, assuming Mothering puts them on the Web site. I'm betting dollars to (fat-free, low-carb, organic spelt flour) donuts that the majority were read with a selective eye to bad news about Demon Soy. I won't keel over in astonishment if the major findings from a lot of the studies contradict her thesis, but were somehow "missed" in her analysis. In short, I smell a rat.

Full disclosure: even though I eat the occasional fish, I am indeed mostly vegetarian, primarily because I don't believe in killing unnecessary, because of the environmental damage that the American meat industry causes the environment, and the suffering of the animals in an inhumane system. But I haven't dedicated my life to ridding the world of the dreaded soy plant by eating it all, either.

There are clearly potential health problems associated with overeating soy, and like all foods, soy isn't appropriate for people who are allergic to it (duh), and also maybe not for breast cancer survivors, young babies, and other select groups. But soy is clearly not the toxic waste the author makes it out to be.

All that said, I'll happily eat (free-range) crow if I follow up on the author's footnotes and find the science to be sound. But if it is, I'll be surprised. Because sound science simply doesn't sound like this article.
post #14 of 127
Originally Posted by babycrazy
...Only 30g of soy per day? Maybe more, because we eat lots of tofu.
And she means soy food in bulk, not soy protein. About the size of three peas, she says.

Originally Posted by babycrazy
Just you wait, soysucker.

Originally Posted by babycrazy
And 220g of soy in a cup of soy milk? That doesn't sound right at all... That doesn't sound like 220g per serving.
She says in the article that it's 220g of soy food, total, not soy protein. Soy milk is virtually entirely water. 1 cup of water weighs about 220g. So that's 220g of water, contaminated with soy, to make 220g of "soy food".

Originally Posted by babycrazy
She claims not. In fact, she says an American invented soymilk and introduced it to Asia.
post #15 of 127
I did catch on to the scare tactics in the description of how the soy proteins are made, which does weaken the point, but otherwise I found the article to be spot-on.

Please tell me what other known to be a common allergen food substance is showing up d@mned near everywhere one looks? And it's being added to Everything! I feel like I can't even buy bread, simple bread, without double checking the labels. I don't buy certain soups we used to use for fear that even that small amount might be what sets me off, or primes my system to react to something else.

Hidden dairy, hidden sodium, and now hidden soy unless one reads the ingredients labels Very closely. This is one of those allergens that can kill a person. The time I reacted from eating soynuts, I didn't wait to see if the reaction would get to the throat closing stage before I hit the Benedryl and inhaler.

If people want to eat it, fine. But it should be labelled the same way peanuts and "processed at a facility that processes peanuts" foods are labelled: Clearly and prominantly.
post #16 of 127

Soy Sorry

I'm sorry to hear about your soy allergy. Do you know about this:
and this:

Your personal problem with soy is common to people with other common food allergies. The underlying problem isn't that soy is "bad", it's that your particular allergen is everywhere, and often not labeled. If you were allergic to, oh, I don't know, jellyfish skin, would it be that much of a problem? (Yes, people do eat it.) The only worse thing for you that I can imagine might be wheat.

Wouldn't it be cool if there were a kit you could use to test samples of food for your particular allergen? Restaurants must be a challenge, too.

post #17 of 127
post #18 of 127
DH and I are in a bit of a panic after reading this too. Glad this thread has started and I will follow closely!
post #19 of 127

We use the 365 brand of rice milk that Whole Foods sells. It's enriched like soy milk, so it has all the same vitamins and such.
post #20 of 127
My two cents: We use Rice Dream, its made with organically grown Brown Rice and has NO ADDED Sugar (soy milk has added sugar). Now that said we don't drink it like milk, we only drink water and occasionally juice. We just use it as a substitute in baking when the recipe calls for dairy
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