Soy....Good or Bad?

You read a lot these days about soy. You read in magazines how great it is. In fact, almost every womans magazine you pick up these days will have an article about losing weight or superfoods, and soy is almost always on the list! How could you NOT think its healthy? Well, I'm about to tell you why it absolutely is not something you should put in your body. But before I do that, let me pose this to you to ponder....

Everytime you read about something being healthy or not, ask yourself  "Who benefits from this? Who is pushing for or against this and why?" Almost all the time the answer will be money. Its common sense really to know that we should all be eating lots of fruits and veggies and other foods as nature intended. And whether or not you believe in God, you HAVE to know, if you just spend a few minutes thinking about it, that everything on this planet is made to work synergistically together. Therefore, you then have to make the assumption that everything our bodies need should already be on this planet. Then, you  can deduce even further, by knowing that its a greater benefit to us to eat those foods when they are as close to nature as possible. We all know, for example, that a pear picked straight from the tree that has not been sprayed with pesticide is much healthier (not to mention tastier!!!) than a can of pears from the grocery store!


Okay. I said all that to get you thinking. Because I've become hyper aware lately about the brainwashing going on in our country these days. Every time you flip on the tv you see an ad about pharmaceuticals. The one that really got me was the one with the dad chatting with his college aged daughter via the internet and she's doing an "intervention" with him to get him to take cholesterol meds. I was thinking "that poor dad! I'm sure he's watching what he's eating and trying to cure himself naturally to avoid the nasty side effects of the cholesterol medication and his whole family is trying to make him take a drug that is going to make him feel bad!!" Yeah, probably not. It is a drug commercial after all. Sad....

Okay, again. I said all THAT because it ties in nicely with my thoughts on soy.

I used to be one of those people that got all their nutrition info from ladies magazines, too. I thought a low fat diet was THE thing to keep from getting fat. I thought all fat was bad. I thought if you got sick you took a drug and called it good. I also thought soy was a great alternative to meat for a lean, healthy protein source. But, then.....I opened my eyes and started paying attention to the world around me and not so much on what's coming out of the tv and magazines.

I used to LOVE soymilk on my granola cereal. Now, I have whole, fresh, raw milk on my organic cereal when I eat it.

I started hearing conflicting reports on soy. I went to a sports nutrition seminar where the highly acclaimed nutritionist said that she doesn't believe organic is all important and that soy is probably okay. I believed her mostly. I do know that pesticides have a cumulative effect on your body so I'm out on her thoughts on organics. But, her soy thoughts made sense to me so I continued to consume my much beloved soymilk.

At the same convention, I sat in Anne Louise Gittleman's seminar where she said soy was bad, sugar is bad, stevia and other herbs were good along with a diet of organics. I thought "This lady is a quack and I'm drinking soymilk!!" Well, since then, I learned that Anne Louise was right on!

One of the things I learned about soy is that it is an estrogen. At the time I didn't really know why that was so bad but I was also buying for my only child chocolate soymilk and he loved it too. I asked my ob/gyn about it and he said its bad because we all have estrogen receptors on our bodies and we absorb estrogen at different rates depending on those receptors. Which means you can't really control the amount of estrogen our body absorbs. We also know that an excess of estrogen is linked to cancer. We also know that young girls are starting puberty as young as 6 years old!!!!! My boy started growing breasts! So, I immediately stopped the soymilk and did a little more research.

I also learned from watching Food, Inc that the company Monsanto chemically treats all their soy plants. Not only that they grow over 90% of all the soy grown. And all of their soy is genetically modified. And even more egregious is that they use their billions to run out all the small farms around the country.

Everyone says, "Well, what about those Asians? They are super healthy and they eat lots of soy!" No they don't..... They eat about 2 tablespoons of fermented soy, such as tamari, miso, and tempeh. Why do you suppose we're told they eat a lot of soy and we should be eating 10 times more than the Asians?!? I'll give you one guess and its a word answer. I think you already know.


Money.

If you want to read even more about the dangers of soy check out this whole food blog. You should definitely check it out. Its very informative.

Food Renegade's Soy Post


This post is part of Food Renegades Fight Back Friday. You can click on this link and see even more healthy food posts from other bloggers. Fight Back Friday, May 20th