Don't worry about it. It's crap. I wish this kind of stuff didn't appear so often. Yellow journalism has been reborn on the internet.
I think it was just last week I read an article in the NY Times about how much money people can make on Facebook by posting inflammatory, controversial and sensationalized news. this is just another example of that.
I actually didn't bother to finish the article. Which makes me feel bad. I really shouldn't tear something up with just a cursory examination.
But... when I started my vegan journey I ended spending way too much time investigating soy. The amount of misinformation, propaganda, and just plain ol' BS made it very difficult for me to actually get to the truth. And there is BS on both sides of the discussion. Anyway, about halfway through I did find a few good articles that really helped me understand what is going on. I will link my favourite at the bottom.
But just after a few paragraphs of this article, I found several claims that when I did my initial research (like 10 years ago) were already proven untrue. And several claims that were just badly out of context.
So my next thing was to back out of the article. What is this
Get Holistic Health website? A quick perusal of their home page showed that most of their articles had a very inflammatory, controversial and sensationalized ring to it. They are not trying to promote knowledge about Holistic Health. They are just trying to generate clicks.
Next, well, who is the author? It doesn't say. which makes it pretty hard to determine their qualifications. or even check out the other articles that they wrote.
Ok, then let's see if they list references. Oh! Surprise! They do. Aha! And right there, third from the bottom is Weston A Price. Weston A. Price was a dentist who started his foundation to promote health. Unfortunately, the Foundation has been co-opted by the dairy and beef industry. And even Price himself is a little bit short on good science. If you google Weston A Price, you find almost as many articles debunking and criticizing him as there are articles by him and his foundation. Add the word quack to your search and the number of hits becomes overwhelming.
Anyway, I feel bad that I dismissed the article without finishing it. If I hadn't already spent so much time wading thru soy propaganda I might be more willing to go bullet point by bullet point and investigate their claims. But what I discovered the first time thru is that although there is some truth to some of the anti-soy claims, most of it is just BS, exaggerated or just based on small studies, and some of it is just been un-replicated and should no longer be reported.
My own conclusion is that soy is perfectly safe to eat and tofu is God's gift to vegans. There has been almost no research on processed soy products (like the isolates or the concentrates). Its probably not as good as they claim. but there is not any evidence that is actually bad for you. I don't think there have been ANY studies on it at all. Soy's relationship with breast cancer is complicated. I don't understand it. there are studies that suggest it prevents it and some that say it might cause it. The one thing everyone agrees on is that more soy and breast cancer research must be done
before we can make a conclusion.
Anyway, if you usually read
Get Holistic Health, I recommend you stop. You might try subscribing to
Nutrition Action instead.
Nutrition Facts is online and free, it's pretty good, too. Maybe the best, tho is the sections in mainstream publications like the Health section of the
New York Times or the Wellness section of the
Washington Post, and the Magazines,
Science and
Nature. You can probably find all this stuff for free at your public library.
And here, before i forget.
https://zenhabits.net/soy/
