Yup, you nailed it. But I still think that eating unfermented soy once in a blue moon isn't enough to kill us. Depends on the person, I guess. Though tofu is funnier than normal soy because you can make it taste the way you want it to taste (though it obviously takes a while and some basic experience with not exploding your kitchen).
I ate some toxic potatoes two days ago. They were quite nice. Toxicity does come in degrees. AFAIK fermentation can only really lower the degree of the toxicity that cooking (ie. edamame, which is boiled in brine) completely eliminates, but it eliminates other steroidal compounds better. I guess you could do both. Deep fried tofu? Either way I don't think it's terribly likely anyone is going to die from eating raw soy beans unless they really overdo it. Not that anyone should specifically try to test that. Just speaking from a rule of thumb and memory here, not doing any actual research, and if Essence is willing to do some I look forward to seeing what he has to say. On the other hand, some food crops really can kill you in short order, like cassava and castor beans.
Soy And: Endocrine Disruption http://www.dovepress.com/relationsh...iomarkers-of-phytoestrogens-phthalates--a9006 http://jpronline.info/index.php/jpr/article/view/10039/5145 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6793/8/17 http://jpronline.info/index.php/jpr/article/view/10039/5145 Obesity http://www.scirp.org/fileOperation/downLoad.aspx?path=FNS20120200017_14673242.pdf&type=journal Digestion http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=fullt.../img/doi/1450-7188/2005/1450-71880536155B.pdf Needless to say, there's more -- a lot more -- out there. This is just the stuff that's easily accessible from the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), one of an Internet researcher's best tools. If I had subscriptions to stuff like Wiley Online, i'd quote a hell of a lot more at you.
I'm running an experimental OS at the moment and don't yet have any PDF reader set up, so I haven't read anything that wasn't in the post above. I will sometime though. Here are some notes. Happily, fermentation does mitigate the phytoestrogens. Phlatates are a big ongoing problem but I wasn't aware of them being bioavailable in soybeans before. Although that correlation is interesting, it'd be better to quote a part that actually speculates a cause. For example, is it that people consume more soy products when they're obese because soy products are used and portrayed as diet foods for weight loss? Obesity might cause tofu eating, not vice versa. It could also be a geographical accident that wasn't controlled for: the US grows a lot of soybeans. The main export customer is China, which has orders for about 13 million tons of the stuff from Sept-1 to next October. The combined consumption of western hemisphere countries pales by comparison at just about a million tons, but that's the runner up. It would be unsurprising if South Americans eat a lot of domestically produced stuff too. Brazil and Argentina are also soybean exporters. It may very well just be that soybeans happen to be cheaper and more abundant here. Protease inhibitors should only be a problem in raw beans, the enzymes do not survive cooking. Leptin is an issue for way more stuff than soy (IE, wheat), and if you have a nasty digestive response to it it's going to be quite a pain to eat a whole lot of foods, kind of like a gluten allergy. As for phytic acid, cooking and fermentation both help with that, and it's in just about every plant food anyway, especially their seeds. I'd be interested to what you would be able to gather if you looked for articles about the benefits.
Uhhh..no. Those would be mung bean sprouts, and have nothing whatosever to do with the conversation. Asian people have used mung bean sprouts for centuries. Soy bean sprouts (which do look similar) are new to their diet (as are all forms of unfermented soy product), and I actually haven't heard of anyone using them in food -- though I could well be merely ignorant on that matter.
Thanks for the links! Very interesting stuff. Unfortunately for me, if all of these effects are certain I'm already fucked since I've been drinking soy milk pretty much daily since I was like 5 (until recently). That said I have no man boobs (a phrase I totally thought I would say on an internet forum) or other high estrogen effects right now, thankfully. And no digestion problems or obesity. Either way, I'll find some other kind of milk to drink. Any suggestions?
Almond milk is absolutely delicious (I like Silk brand's, especially when I'm looking for chocolate milk), and it's got a long and flavorful history (no pun intended). It's been around since the Dark Ages, when the Catholics decided that you couldn't drink cow milk during Lent. It's literally just ultra-finely-ground almond particles suspended in water, and depending on the brand, you can get more or less almondy almond milk. I drink it because it's 1/3 the cost of my raw milk and is equally satisfying when made into ice cream or eaten with cookies.
Ok, forgive my ignorance. I thought it was all soy bean (or that mung bean was an alternate name or something). Stuff gets lost in translation.
Just don't bother. For as long as your diet is overall balanced and you like this stuff, there's no need to change it. Enzymes don't really survive heat processing so you can make it into a non-issue if you are really afraid, but even if it is not the healthiest thing ever, it is not a poison, and since humans have surprising adaptive potential and you were drinking it for a long time, it's possible for you to be already resistant to the "side effects" to a substantial degree. Well, other than the "obesity" one but I stand by the statement that what you eat is not the problem when it comes to gaining weight, but rather how little you exercise; if you are getting your share of exercising, you shouldn't have any problems. And the "man boobs" one is a non-issue from the start, too. Sure, eating soy does increase the chances of you getting them, but the number of people for whom that actually changes anything in their bodies in the long run is rather small, and it's mostly about people whose diet is out of whack and who don't exercise enough, and thus have utterly threshed bodies in terms of hormone balance, since only then the change brought by soy will be significant enough. And the same about many other things of this sort - unless something is stated to directly affect something and not just increase chances, you aren't really going to be affected unless you either don't try to keep yourself in condition (a ruined body is more likely to be changed by any external factors because it's too weak to properly keep itself the way it was), or are one of the few "genetically inclined" for these changes (but in this case you would likely know, because you would be closer to the "border" between the two possible states and at least one of your parents would be similar in that, so it's easier to notice it). Now, getting back to the topic, you might want to try almond milk if you really want to change, but I've no other suggestions that would not be animal milk (and possibly expensive in some cases).
Kazeto is absolutely right. If you've been drinking soymilk for more than a decade and you like the way your body operates, there's zero reason to change -- the only thing it can do is make your body work differently, which you're quite likely to enjoy less.
Allowing soybeans to sprout is a way to make them somewhat easier to digest. A similar thing happens with potatoes, but the sprouts also produce toxic substances. I ate the potato anyway. It was quite sweet and very different.
These were sitting in my kitchen waiting for me to make sprouts like those in your picture. They are just what the package says.
Phew this is getting a bit heated for me! But I'd just like to add in that Nutrition is a relatively young science. Hundreds of single studies done give 'groundbreaking news media results!' that are only contradicted by another single study. Nothing in the grand scheme of Nutritional science is actually considered fact until it is well and truly tested and repeated. So, read even medical journal articles with a grain of salt (and considering that all peer reviewed journals are made up of articles that are written by people who are funded for finding "results" of something definite, one should use extra caution when assuming that Dr. so and so or professor so and so can be trusted to be reasonable about their own findings). As one additional note, even when we see how X thing works and understand it, and can correlate it to how X thing works in the body on paper, it doesn't always work the way it should! (or that we THINK it should). A great example that all of you probably know are antioxidants. Despite it making completely logical sense based on our understanding of the antioxidant compounds found in food themselves and the way antioxidants (at least those naturally produced in the body) work in relation to eliminating free radicals which can cause cancer, etc, countless (and I mean COUNTLESS) studies have failed to produce conclusive proof that consuming foods high in antioxidants (or even more tenuous, those antioxidant substances removed from their natural state - aka blueberries vs a powdered form of the antioxidants found in blueberries) actually have any positive benefit. This isn't to say that they don't, but that we can't prove that they do, despite how much money has been poured into researching it! And it is one of the better researched nutritional issues that is considered 'canon' by the general populous but is not by at least a few of the large, non-privately funded nutrition research groups. Again, I'm not trying to step on anyone's toes.
There's also that free radicals are what we use to kill bacteria (or as my chem prof once said "OXIDIZE THE SHIT OUT OF THEM") so if you're sick maybe you should lay off the antioxidants .
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/are-berries-the-new-snake-oil/ Essentially, he's saying that antioxidants are unproven, the studies have given inconsistent results.
just as an FYI; what was proven with one study and disproved the next can and often has been re-proofed as being true.
Eat, Drink, and be merry. Good idea, right? Leave these studies where they belong, in the minds and hands of insane nutritionally maddened people. (Take it either/both ways.) The easy advice is this: If you feel alright eating what you already do, then you probably do not need to change your diet. If not, then read up and diversify a bit and see how that treats you.
It's boiled tofu in boiled greens, a vegan's paradise. Just don't believe what they tell you about it being nutritionally imbalanced.
