Please nobody take offense; soy seems to be one of those hot-button issues that many people have strong emotional attachments to.
Soy has been eaten for centuries if not millenia. It's a fairly common food in China, and is used on a smaller scale in neighboring countries.
Most of the hysteria over soy started when some scientists in Italy discovered that a diet rich in soy products tends to reduce blood serum cholesterol.
Unfortunately, they speculated that it might be due to the phytoestrogens in soy. I doubt it. More likely, the lecithin.
That, however, drew attention to the fact that soy contains phytoestrogens. It was fairly well-publicized research, and word got around.
Feminist activists then seized on the research to claim that "soy is good for women". To cash in, food processors started releasing soy products with product logos and slogans calculated to appeal to feminists.
Do women need more hormones than they naturally make? Unlikely. Too many hormones is a good way to get cancer by the way. But that is unlikely too as soy doesn't have that much phytoestrogen, and it isn't as biologically active in humans as the real thing.
Unfortunately, though, their ideologically-motivated claims started provoking counter-claims. If it's "good for women", it must be "bad for men" and would make them effeminate and impotent.
Ask yourself if China has a dearth of fertility.
World Net Daily went over the top with a notorious claim that soy makes you "gay".
www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53327The phytoestrogens in soy have roughly a thousandth the effect of human estrogen.
The idea that estrogen is a "female hormone" is an artifact of western religious duality--thinking of the world as "opposites" (you know, like if a man and woman touch each other, they'll cancel each other out--POOF!).
Men make it too. Probably have to--male bodies and female bodies are highly isomorphic--the only differences are quantitative not qualitative. Everything that's on the one is on the other (with a nip here and a tuck there...). Next time you see a man shirtless, notice that he has nipples.
Estrogen and testosterone also happen to be closely-related chemically, and hormonal imbalances can be caused by one not being effectively converted to the other, or being too much converted to the other.
I'm not convinced that all that much of the phytoestrogen even reaches your bloodstream intact.
Now for the shocker: other foods contain it too. Notably other beans. Soy is not particularly unusual.
There really is a problem with effeminization of boys in recent generations. I suggest looking at Phthalates as the culprit, not soy. They are antagonists to male hormones, and they're common especially in products that women (mothers) tend to use. They're banned at our house which is not easy to enforce as they are ubiquitous and not listed on product ingredients.
What about soy as a notorious allergen?
True soy allergies are rare. THAT'S WHY A LOT OF INFANTS END UP ON SOY-BASED BABY FORMULA. Soy proteins tend to be fairly short-chain. It's the long ones like casein (cheese), gluten (wheat products), and avenin (oats) that tend to cause trouble. I've got fairly severe sensitivities to certain proteins ever since the doctor prescribed acid blockers instead of noticing that I had a hiatal hernia.
I was probably within a few days or weeks of death when they did surgery to fix it.
Had severe GI problems for years until someone I know suggested "leaky gut". I cut out all the suspect proteins (finding it extremely difficult to eat), and slowly re-introduced them one by one.
It wasn't the soy. In fact I can eat that in seemingly any quantity without pain.
In my case it's casein, gluten, and avenin. The gluten sensitivity is minor; the sensitivity to casein and avenin are severe. A bowl of oatmeal can make me violently ill the rest of the day.
One more issue about soy:
It has practically always been processed before consumption. Hard to cook tender without a pressure-cooker, and then they are somewhat unpleasantly bland and oily.
It has almost always been made into soy-milk (which is a precursor to daufu), daufu, tempeh, soy sauce (in the old days, naturally brewed), fermented soy past (both the Chinese version, and Japanese Miso), etc.
For the same reason, it is a favorite in "western" countries for fractionation.
This does not make it any less fit for human food IF YOU DON'T FRACTIONATE IT. By the same token on't blame healthy, natural Amerindian corn for the fact that corn is typically fractionated too (high-fructose corn syrup, corn oil, corn starch, hydrolyzed corn protein, etc).
Mike, I consider it just a relatively inexpensive protein. We're more apt to grow it for human food than animal. One problem we have is that it is HIGHLY attractive to animals, including pesky birds, squirrels, deer, mice, etc. They seem to sense its protein content and will find a few plants in acres of other stuff.
We also need soys that are day-neutral as too far north for some of them to bloom and set seed in time to ripen.
