Philosophical Vegan Forum

I've been trying to read up soy and potential health risks, and I've had a hard time making sense of anything. I open up one article, and it tells me soy will make me sterile, retarded and give me breast cancer. The next article I read will tell me the exact opposite, and that soy is greatly beneficial to my health. I also heard that a certain organization (forgot its name, sorry) is purposefully leading a crusade to spread lies about soy, while simultaneously promoting the health benefits of meat consumption.

So far the most reliable source of information I can seem to find is this, since it cites tons of peer-reviewed scientific articles.

Does anyone know more about this whole debacle?

The truth is that soy is neither a miracle food, nor harmful to your health.

It seems to be true that fermented soy is healthier than non-fermented soy, and has improved nutritional qualities. But that's also kind of like saying that wild rice is healthier than black rice- they're both excellent foods, one is slightly better.

Sprouted and fermented grain and legume foods are generally healthier than their alternatives (depending of course on what they are fermented with), due to improved probiotic and nutritional factors (like making some minerals more available). The difference, however, in an otherwise healthy diet is unlikely to be very significant (probably not even measurable).

The thing is, when you make certain minerals (like iron) more available, your system just throttles down absorption of those minerals to compensate for the higher availability.

The only people who should be worrying about optimizing nutrition to that degree are those who are on restricted calorie diets for some reason, or have clinical digestive issues.

As an example of this at work: Vegans usually have lower iron levels, but don't typically suffer more anemia because of it (the body compensates and absorbs what it needs from food). Meat eaters' iron levels are often too high (which leads to higher chance of infection, and other maladies).

EDIT: It should be noted, however, that agriculturally soy IS somewhat of a "miracle" crop. So that alone should be enough for any reasonable and environmentally conscious people to encourage its use over lower yield crops (although not exclusive use, of course).