I came across your article, "Should We Be Scared of Soy" and was frankly, quite surprised at how balanced it was given that your site promotes vegetarianism. Don't get me wrong, I mean no offense. It's just that most of the pro-soy/vegetarian writings I come across bear the distasteful odor of vegetarian religious fanaticism that I find disturbing. Your piece, on the other hand, takes a less dogmatic and more objective approach to the issue.  

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that I hew to the Weston A. Price philosophy of a balanced diet that includes foods from both the plant and animal kingdoms. I was a vegetarian myself for a time and found that, while my health improved initially, over time it declined. I suspect that part, if not most, of the problem was the preponderance of soy products I consumed - everything from straight tofu to all manner of soy pseudo-foods.  

The lesson I learned from that experience was that eating a balanced diet of natural foods was a better option for me. I find it curious that soy products are held in such high regard among the natural foods and vegetarian faithful when even a casual glance at the ingredient list of many soy products show them to be anything but natural. These 'healthful' foods, bereft of any natural properties that would make them palatable by most people's standard, are often loaded with monosodium-glutamate (typically disguised as 'flavorings' or some other euphemism) and gobs of sugar. MSG is one of the most prevalent and harmful excitotoxins you can legally ingest.  

When irrefutable evidence of the harmful effects of soy consumption arise, we are salved with the assurance that everything will be ok so long as we adhere to a practice of moderate consumption. This sorry excuse for health advice reached an apex in a laughable pro-soy article in the Washington Post earlier this year which recounted the results of a study on the effects of megadoses of soy on men. The article said:  

"Nipple discharge, breast enlargement and slight decreases in testosterone occurred with the megadoses. But 'we still couldn't find anything that was serious."  

Really! Most guys I know would consider breasts and any other feminizing side effects of eating soy rather serious indeed. On a less jovial note, I saw my daughter suffer from early puberty, due I believe, to our soy-heavy diet at the time. The problem is that because soy is so cheap to produce, it's found in just about every processed food we eat. Fast food outlets and restaurants make heavy use of soy-enhanced foods. Even much of the meat on the market today is raised on soy feed. Most people have no idea that they really are consuming well above moderate levels of soy. Soy consumption on this level has never before occurred in human history. It remains to be seen what the outcome of this dietary tsunami will yield.  

It has been said that if consumers of meat could see how their food was processed, they would give it up. I believe this is true given the deplorable conditions found on factory farms that practice cow cannibalism and double as concentration camps. But in the days when you bought your meat from the farmer down the road, it wasn't true at all, because you knew that farmer ate the very same food and treated his animals much more humanely. Today, soy products are little different from factory-farmed meats in that a closer examination of the process by which these 'foods' are derived would dissolve any remaining preference for most soy foods.  

The truth about what we eat is kept from us today making it difficult to know whether the scientific research we base our dietary decisions on is truly objective or has been grossly manipulated by corporate greed. The FDA, that guardian of the public health, is sadly, indicative of how far-reaching corruption within the food industry has become.  

What finally turned me against soy and opened my eyes to the state of modern food was the realization that the soy industry is no different from any other industry in that most of their decisions are driven by the pursuit of profit. For years, the soy industry has shaped our opinions and influenced our buying habits through large outlays of cash on marketing, advertising and black magic in corporate food labs. This is to be expected in a free-market system, but what has been truly frightening is their profit motivated influence on nutrition science and government legislation. I've since learned to apply the same level of scrutiny to the health claims for soy that I would apply to the suspect assurances of a used car salesman. To be fair, I regard the rest of the food industry with an equal amount of skepticism. 

So what does one do in an era where you can no longer trust science, government and food producers to be honest and objective? I rely on the truths that I can discern with my own eyes and through my own experiences. This has led me to the consumption of traditional foods: fruits, vegetables, meat, fish and dairy. I cut soy and all other processed foods from my diet. I switched to meat raised on traditional diets on small farms, meat that is derived from animals whose caretakers respect them. I eat home grown produce that has not been 'frankenized' in the lab and nuked with pesticides. In my family, we cook everything. 'Convenience foods' is an expletive under our roof. We consume raw dairy products and plenty of fermented foods to aid with digestion. I found that when I stopped outsourcing the nourishment of my family to corporate strangers and started raising (vegetables) and cooking my own food, I reconnected with my cultural history and as a bonus, saw my health and the health of my family dramatically improve. I decided that since you can't tell the food lies from the food truths anymore, it's safer to stick with what you know. 

I enjoyed your article. 

Richard Morris 

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