SuperFoods -> Soy

One of the recent national morning shows featured a cooking segment about the nutritional benefits of tofu.

“This will be great,” said the host of the show. “I’m trying to gel more soy into my diet.” “Well, then, this should work out really well,” replied the co-host. “You can have mine!”

This brief humorous interchange typifies the way many of us think about soy and tofu, in particular. We think we should eat more of it, though we may not be sure why, and some of us are convinced we want no part of it whatsoever.

Soy is a valuable addition to your diet and, even if you never dreamed you’d eat it and even if you never, ever want to cook tofu, there are other ways to incorporate soy foods into your daily diet.

Here is the good news in a nutshell: soy truly is a SuperFood. It offers tremendous health benefits when incorporated into your diet. It’s an inexpensive, high-quality, vitamin- and mineral-rich plant protein with lots of soluble fiber, plant-based omega-3 fatty acids, and, most important, it offers a wealth of disease-fighting phytonutrients. Indeed, soy is the richest known dietary source of powerful health-promoting phytoestrogens. Soy has been recognized by many researchers as playing a positive role in preventing cardiovascular disease, cancer, and osteoporosis as well as helping to relieve menopausal and menstrual symptoms. More-over, you don’t have to eat tons of it to enjoy its considerable advantages. Once you learn about the proven benefits of soy and the simple ways you can incorporate this unique food into your diet, we think you’ll become a convert.

Soybeans have been cultivated in China since the eleventh century B.C. Indeed, the soybean is the most widely grown and utilized legume in the world. The Chinese name for the soybean is “greater bean,” and soy is also referred to as “meat without bones.” Like other beans, soybeans grow in pods, and while we most commonly think of them as green, they can also be yellow, black, or brown. The soybean was introduced to America in the eighteenth century by that innovative, forward-looking American Ben Franklin, who, impressed with tofu—the Chinese “cheese made from soybeans”—had some beans shipped from Paris to a group of farmers in Pennsylvania. It wasn’t until the next century that soybeans were extensively planted by American farmers. In the twentieth century, people began to recognize the health-promoting qualities of the soybean, and today, to many people’s surprise, the United States is the world’s largest commercial producer of soybeans.

Soy has long been recognized as a highly nutritious food. Western scientists became particularly interested in soy when they noticed that people eating Asian diets enjoyed lower rates of heart disease as well as less cancer and osteoporosis, and had fewer hormonal problems than those eating a typical Western diet. While much research still has to be done, there is now broad agreement on various connections between soy and health promotion.

Soy’s most conclusively demonstrated benefit concerns cardiovascular health. There have been extensive studies on the cholesterol-lowering effect of soy. One frequently cited study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1995, describes an analysis of thirty-eight different studies. The authors found that consumption of soy protein resulted in significant reductions in total cholesterol (9.3 percent). LDL cholesterol (12.9 percent), and triglycerides (10.5 percent) with a small though not significant increase in HDL cholesterol. A recent study (March 2003) in the Journal of Nutrition demonstrated that the intake of soy foods among the premenopausal women subjects was inversely related to their risk for coronary artery disease and stroke as well as other disorders. Similar studies have demonstrated the same effect with people with diabetes and people with high cholesterol.