Should we worry about soya in our food?
Felicity Lawrence
Tuesday July 25, 2006
London Guardian

Whether you know it or not, you'll probably be eating soya today. It's in 60% of all processed food, from cheese to ice cream, baby formula to biscuits. But should it carry a health warning?

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For Dr Mike Fitzpatrick, the saga of soya began in Monty Python-style with a dead parrot. His investigations into the ubiquitous bean started in 1991 when Richard James, a multimillionaire American lawyer, turned up at the laboratory in New Zealand where Fitzpatrick was working as a consultant toxicologist. James was sure that soya beans were killing his rare birds.

"We thought he was mad, but he had a lot of money and wanted us to find out what was going on," Fitzpatrick recalls.

Over the next months, Fitzpatrick carried out an exhaustive study of soya and its effects. "We discovered quite quickly," he recalls, "that soya contains toxins and plant oestrogens powerful enough to disrupt women's menstrual cycles in experiments. It also appeared damaging to the thyroid." James's lobbying eventually forced governments to investigate. In 2002, the British government's expert committee on the toxicity of food (CoT) published the results of its inquiry into the safety of plant oestrogens, mainly from soya proteins, in modern food. It concluded that in general the health benefits claimed for soya were not supported by clear evidence and judged that there could be risks from high levels of consumption for certain age groups. Yet little has happened to curb soya's growth since.

More than 60% of all processed food in Britain today contains soya in some form, according to food industry estimates. It is in breakfast cereals, cereal bars and biscuits, cheeses, cakes, dairy desserts, gravies, noodles, pastries, soups, sausage casings, sauces and sandwich spreads. Soya, crushed, separated and refined into its different parts, can appear on food labels as soya flour, hydrolysed vegetable protein, soy protein isolate, protein concentrate, textured vegetable protein, vegetable oil (simple, fully, or partially hydrogenated), plant sterols, or the emulsifier lecithin. Its many guises hint at its value to manufacturers....

Unfortunately, there's a size limit to the posts on IF. You can read the full article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/Story/0,,1828158,00.html

__________________
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control;
these three alone lead one to sovereign power.
Tennyson

I found this at Snopes.com.

http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/soya.asp

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InterfaithForums.com-Where your ideas and beliefs count.

Yeah, I'm normally pretty leary of stories with nothing but anecdotal evidence to back them up. But the Guardian article seems to have done its homework.

Then again, everybody's trying to sell something these days. Everybody's got something to hide, 'cept for me and my monkey....

__________________
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control;
these three alone lead one to sovereign power.
Tennyson