We’re fucked if it is. But that’s what this report from the Taipei Times says:

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 percent 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 percent of the whole bean — has meanwhile driven the postwar explosion in snack foods around the world. Potato chips, confectionery, deep-fried takeaways, 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.

However, now there is a huge Soya industry in the US and its spends gazillions of dollars trying to prove that soya is good for you–but there might more to this than we expected:

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 estrogens 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,” he said.

There is also a further distinction:

What the committee also pointed out was that the way soya was processed affected the levels of phyto-estrogens. Traditional fermentation reduces the levels of isoflavones two to threefold.

Modern factory processes do not. Moreover, modern US 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 their libido).

Finally, the article relates the whole industry to the global economy:

Until 2003, the US was the largest exporter of soya. But through the 1990s, multinationals promoted the expansion of the crop in Latin America, helping finance farmers and building the infrastructure for soya exports. The attraction of Latin America is that land is cheap and labor costs are minimal. Three years ago, the combined exports from Brazil and Argentina surpassed US exports for the first time. The cost is now being counted there in environmental damage and social upheaval. The cost to Western consumers may yet be counted in health.

I feel cheated. All those times that I ordered a fucking soy nonfat latte. I might as well have just gone ahead and gotten the regular one. NOw that i think about it, despite being fairly moderate in my tastes there are a lot of unhealthy things that I do eat. And I think that the only thing that one can do now is eat a lot of fish and don’t eat a lot of other stuff. I think I will have to reread this article in order to understand it more fully, esp. when it comes to eating tofu. I know now that I should stay away from the soy milk products that I see on US supermarket shelves and that I ought to take tofu in moderation. But still, i need to know more. Glad I found this article. [tags]soya, beans, tofu, health, Asia, food, diet, nutrition, industry, US, China, Japan[/tags]