By SYD BAUMEL

It seemed like a sly urban legend, custom-designed to spook health-conscious baby boomers like me who think we can hear a thud whenever another brain cell bites the dust. The mysterious message posted three years ago to the Internet newsgroup sci.med.nutrition was a brief, well-polished account of an alleged National Institutes of Health study. Elderly men who regularly ate tofu in midlife, the study purportedly found, were significantly more likely than those who eschewed tofu to suffer from Alzheimer's disease.

S-c-a-r-y stuff - if true.

Immediately and for a good year or two thereafter, I kept checking Medline (the index of medical research) and the popular media for word on this sensational study. I found not a trace. Ever so gradually, tofu crept back into my ethically upright veganish diet.

But last fall, Ian Goddard, whose website "Goddard's Journal" has earned him a finger-wagging profile on 60 Minutes for its exposés of alleged government conspiracies, caused a stir on several newsgroups when he posted a newer version of this urban—as it now became apparent—non-legend.

"As a vegetarian," Goddard prefaced his bombshell, "I present the following with great regret. Soy products like tofu have provided the staple alternative to eating murdered animals."

Goddard proceeded to repeat the scary tofu tale, but this time with links to supporting articles on the websites of two Hawaiian newspapers and with evidence as plain as the J in JFK that the study had been conducted not in some prankster's imagination but at The Pacific Health Research Institute in Honolulu. Indeed, it had just been presented at the Third International Symposium on the Role of Soy in Preventing and Treating Chronic Disease in Washington. This was hardly a venue for people with an irrational grudge against soy. The symposium had been co-organised and co-sponsored by a who's who of the soybean industry, including the American Soybean Association, the United Soybean Board, and that Darth Vader of agribusiness, Monsanto. As for the enigmatic 1997 newsgroup message, its source had been a preliminary abstract of the same study presented in 1996 at a Japanese conference on Alzheimer's Disease. This April, the study itself by Lon White, M.D., and his associates finally hit the big time, gaining publication in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition.

Though its results were surprising and unprecedented, other scientists weren't scoffing at White's study—not even researchers who specialise in touting the benefits of soy.

It's "an important study. He's done good work," Dr. Brian F. Issell of the Cancer Research Center of Hawaii told the Honolulu Star Bulletin. "I am myself frightened a little bit by all of this. There is so much we don't know," Finnish scientist Herman Adlercreutz commented at the soy conference. Twenty years ago, Adlercreutz pioneered research into the benefits of soy. Everyone, including White himself, called for more research on the possible soy-dementia connection. (UPDATE, January, 2007:  There have been no further long-term studies of the relationship between soy and dementia in humans. In contrast, there have been a few short-term clinical trials in which soy has improved cognitive function in humans.)

White's unsettling study drew upon a huge pool of Japanese-American men who had enrolled in 1965 in a well-known mega-study called the Honolulu Heart Program. Among other things, the men's diets were surveyed in detail, then, and again in the early 1970s. Later, between 1991 and 1993, when the 3734 available survivors and recently deceased were in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, White's group used a battery of tests (including neuroimaging and autopsy data) to assess the state of the men's brains and minds. They found senile dementia (Alzheimer's and similar diseases) in 225 of them and lesser signs and symptoms of cognitive decline in another 864. When White et al. sought to find a connection between these changes and the men's diets, the results were startling.

Among the 27 food and drink items surveyed, only the men's intake of the two soy foods—tofu and miso—correlated significantly with the measures of senility. The miso effect shrank into statistical insignificance when tofu intake was held constant. But the tofu effect was robust. It withstood a battery of attempts to rule out confounding factors like age, education, obesity, and hidden correlations to the 26 other food and drink items (including coffee and green and black tea). The statistical odds against the tofu effect being a fluke varied from 20 to 1 to over 1000 to 1, depending on the dementia-related endpoints measured. Practically speaking, men who had customarily eaten two or more servings of tofu per week in midlife (likely reflecting a lifelong habit) were, on average, 2.4 times as likely as men who ate tofu "rarely or never" to have become senile or forgetful by old age. "The test results were about equivalent to what they would have been if they were five years older," White put it to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

Was it just a guy thing? When White et al. did the same analysis on 502 of the men's wives (presuming they had eaten like their husbands) the tofu-senility effect reappeared in statistical miniature.

"These data," White and associates concluded this April, "suggest that regular consumption of tofu over many years in middle life may have an adverse influence on brain aging manifest as accelerated atrophy, cognitive decline, and a lowering of the threshold for the clinical manifestations of Alzheimer's disease."

Ouch.

Well . . . It seems Asians are not quite the prolific soy-munchers Westerners have made them out to be. The folks at Soy Online Service (a website that dishes the dirt on soy the way others trash aspartame or mercury dental fillings) cite evidence that soy was and still is no more a staple of Asian diets than eggs or cheese are around here. "In Singapore and Hong Kong," White writes, "tofu is the only soy food eaten regularly and in substantial amount, but . . . it is commonly consumed only 1-3 times each week." A large 1998 survey found that Japanese men and women only ate around 60 grams of soy foods per day. Even Soy.com—a leading soy-is-beautiful website—admits "the average intake of isoflavones [the key "medicinal" ingredients in soy] in Asian countries is 20-50 milligrams per day."

These estimates put Asian soy consumption in the area of one average serving every day or two of isoflavone-rich soy foods like soybeans, tofu, soy milk, textured soy protein, and tempeh. While even this would be enough—judging by White's preliminary research—to gradually chip away at those brain cells, it's still well short of the amount consumed by many Westerners today. For some vegans, "soy-" has become a prefix for almost every other item in their diets—from soy milk and soy ice cream to soy nuts and soy burgers. Yet one doesn't need any soy to follow a healthy vegan or vegetarian diet.

Soy-bashing reaches a new low in this deceptive diatribe. Reviewed by Syd Baumel.

We boldly attempt to separate the curds of confoundment from the sweet whey of truth.

Do you love soy?  If you are a healthy person, make sure you are getting the best Nutrition with a diet full of soy!  For the best information on whole foods, sign online today.  The internet is full of information on how you can manage a low carb diet!

Here are a few articles that take a more positive view of the embattled health food: 

Response To Misleading Article About Soy In Mothering Magazine - by John Robbins (2004)

Is Soy Safe? - Brenda Davis, R.D. (2003)

Is It Safe to Eat Soy? - by Virginia Messina, MPH, R.D. and Mark Messina, Ph.D (circa 2003)

Is It True What They Say About Soy? - UC Berkeley Wellness Letter, 2002

What about Soy? - by John Robbins, circa 2000