SOY POLLOI: Americans today spend upward of $4 billion yearly on soy food products. Although the versatile soybean provides many health benefits, some 90 percent of the U.S. crop is grown using genetically modified seeds, engineered to withstand repeated dousing with Monsanto's herbicide, glyphosate.
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Dear Earth Talk: How healthy is soy? I heard that, despite its healthy image, most soy is grown using chemicals like other crops and is even being genetically modified.—D. Frinka, Syracuse, N.Y.
Food products made with soy have enjoyed great popularity in the U.S. and elsewhere in recent years. Two decades ago, Americans spent $300 million a year on soy food products; today we spend over $4 billion. More and more adults are substituting soy—a great source of protein—for meat, while a quarter of all baby formula contains soy instead of milk. Many school lunch programs nationwide have added soy-based veggie burgers to their menus, as have countless restaurants, including diners and fast food chains.
And there are hundreds of other edible uses of the legume, which now vies with corn for the title of America's most popular agricultural crop. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration promotes the inclusion of soy into other foods to cut down on heart attack risk. Clinical studies have shown that soy can also lower the risk for certain types of breast and prostate cancer.
But there may be a dark side to soy’s popularity and abundance. “Many of soy’s health benefits have been linked to isoflavones—plant compounds that mimic estrogen,” reports Lindsey Konkel in Environmental Health News. “But animal studies suggest that eating large amounts of those estrogenic compounds might reduce fertility in women, trigger premature puberty and disrupt development of fetuses and children.” But before you dump out all your soy foods, note that the operative phrase here is “large amounts” which, in laboratory science, can mean amounts substantially above what one would consume in real life.
Also at issue is that upwards of 90 percent of the U.S. soybean crop is grown using genetically modified (GM) seeds sold by Monsanto. These have been engineered to withstand repeated dousing with the herbicide, glyphosate (also sold by Monsanto and marketed as RoundUp). According to the nonprofit Non GMO Project, this allows soybean farmers to repeatedly spray their fields with RoundUp to kill all weeds (and other nearby plant life) except for the soybean plants they are growing.
The U.S. government permits the sale and consumption of GM foods, but many consumers aren’t so sure it’s OK to eat them—given not only the genetic tinkering but also the exposure to so much glyphosate. Due to these concerns, the European Union has had a moratorium on GM crops of all kinds since 1998.
The fact that genetically modified soy may be present in as much as 70 percent of all food products found in U.S. supermarkets means that a vast majority of Americans may be putting a lot of GM soy into their systems every day. And not just directly via cereals, breads and pasta: Some 98 percent of the U.S. soybean crop is fed to livestock, so consumers of meat, eggs and dairy are indirectly ingesting the products of scientific tinkering with unknown implications for human health.
Since GM soy has only been around and abundant for less than a decade, no one yet knows for sure what the long term health effects, if any, will be on the populations of countries such as the U.S. that swear by it. Natural foods stores like WholeFoods are your best bet for finding non-GM foods of all sorts.
CONTACTS: Environmental Health News, www.environmentalhealthnews.org; Non GMO Project, www.nongmoproject.org.
EarthTalk® is written and edited by Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss and is a registered trademark of E – The Environmental Magazine (www.emagazine.com). Send questions to: earthtalk@emagazine.com. Subscribe: www.emagazine.com/subscribe; Request a Free Trial Issue: www.emagazine.com/trial.
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11 Comments
Add CommentWell this is certainly a good article if the goal was to fan the flames of paranoid fears and make believe that innuendo and suspicions are science? Who wrote this? The editor for science fiction? There are serious scientific issues here, suggesting further investigation. The article doesn't properly cover them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWho wrote this? Are you sure it wasn't cut and pasted from the National Inquirer? Why not concentrate of the facts as they are known and not on the imagined facts that aren't.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNot a thing is paranoid about the desire to keep Monsanto, Round-Up, and any GM product out of the human body. Only someone tied to Monsanto would write otherwise.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSince you obviously don't know how science works, suspicions are the basis of science.
The fact that the U.S. government has approved the use and sale of genetically modified products to its citizens clearly illustrates that government exists to further benefits to big business, not the citizens whom it governs. The current approval of GMOs is another example of putting the cart well before the horse. If you are capable of thinking that issues discussed here warrant further investigation, then you should also reject approval of GM products until those issues HAVE been investigated. See: thalidomide.
@lamorpa
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNote that by-line of Earth Talk. The environmental magazine writes articles for its sponsors and provides them for free to many different publications.
In fact, the article doesn't need to fully cover the scientific issues here. It only needs to make readers feel besieged but empowered, mention tangentally-related scientific studies, and link to its sponsors' websites at the end. It also accomplishes the bonus goal of stoking its readers' already well-established hatred of GMOs in general and Monsanto in particular.
If you can't understand how the health effects of non-fermented soy have anything to do with GMOs and you would instead like to hear from that evil conspiracy known as 'peer review', try PubMed.gov. Some possible search terms (besides soy) are phytoestrogen, endocrine disruptor, cancer, and benefits. Reality is of course more complicated than 'X is good for treating everything in everyone'.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20484551
"suspicions are the basis of science"?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSorry. No.
The purpose of scientific experiments is to answer questions that may begin "I wonder..."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat, my friend, forms a suspicion.
The dictionary definition of suspicion is, "A feeling of distrust or perceived guilt for something." What other definition are you using? Suspicion is an approach with a bias, not (an attempt at) unbiased scientific investigation. I think you may have been thinking of the word curiosity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisParticularly because of the estrogen like components of soy products there have long been some doubts about consuming large amounts. Walter Willett of Harvard mentioned this years ago in Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy. He actually used the phrase 'dark' side, and recommended only a few serving a week as opposed to a few a day.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisQuestion: would the estrogen like compounds still be present in the protein we eat from animals? My guess would be that they would not.
Ahh, perhaps I was. Curiosity carries less of a stigma of bias, though both suspicion and curiosity lead to [or should lead to] experimentation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'll grant you I was being overly semantic. I knew what you meant, but in combination with the article, which was clearly pushing unbased suspicions, I thought the distinction was important.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have a lot of issues with soy. First of all this article does point out that fact that it is in 70% of food. Food companies are stripping food of their natural goodness and adding soy just to up the protein content. Not to mention it's awful that one company, Monsanto, has a monopoly on the US's 2nd largest crop. A crop that they license out like Microsoft does its software. Pesticides are not good for humans, animals, or the environment. Cows evolved to eat grass and to roam pastures, not to stay in a concrete prison to eat corn and soy. Factory farming is a whole other issue.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSoy, nutritional speaking isn't all that good. There is a isoflavones issue which mimic estrogen in the human body. The American Heart Association no longer hails soy as a heart healthy food. So also contains something called antinutrients and one of them is an enzyme that blocks protease (an enzyme used to digest protein). They also contain haemagglutinin which causes red blood cells to clump together. Another substance called goitrogens which suppress thyroid function and phytates which block the absorption of some minerals.
Don't get me wrong, soy in moderation isn't all that bad, especially fermented soy like natto which is amazing for you, but we have these vegans living on it, people drinking soy milk, soy burgers, fast food companies adding soy to their "meat" products to up the protein content, soy is abused not to mention a GMO that Monsanto patented.