To Soy or Not To Soy?

Having a fat disorder makes life challenging in many ways.  There are constant decisions to be made every day with regard to activity levels, pain management, and food choices.  The recommendations we hear in the mass media about maintaining a healthy lifestyle sound intriguing, but all-too-often that advice is not good for those of us with rare adipose disorders (RADs).  That is thought to be the case with soy.  We have all heard about the benefits of eating a diet rich in soy/tofu, often in place of higher fat meat and dairy products.  The media tells us that soy is a good source of low-fat protein that is loaded with beneficial phytoestrogens that protect us from hot flashes, breast cancer, osteoporosis, and various chronic diseases.

Recent research, however, calls those claims into question and asks what amount of soy is truly beneficial, and could there be a level that is so high as to be potentially harmful?  Using new techniques, researchers have, for the first time, been able to analyze the phytoestrogen content found in foods that come from animals (eggs, dairy, meat) and found that all of them contained some level of phytoestrogens.  So without trying, people eating a typical diet are already ingesting these previously-hidden phytoestrogens, plus they are getting many soy derivatives found in processed foods.  If we compound this by intentionally adding soy to our diet, we may actually be overdosing our bodies with phytoestrogens.  This could result in the escalation of some of the cancers and chronic diseases we were intentionally trying to preempt.  You see, low levels of estrogens promote healthy blood vessels, but at higher levels, they cause blood vessels to leak.   Since those of us with RADs are thought to have blood vessels that are more prone to leakage of fluid and proteins already, the RAD Diet recommends keeping soy consumption to a minimum (one serving of soy or less per day) to minimize any ill effects.  Just to help you calibrate how many phytoestrogens are found in soy products…sweetened soy milk contains almost 500 times the phytoestrogens of skim milk!  So if you have a RAD, minimize the intentional consumption of soy products such as veggie burgers and tofu, and be vigilant about how much soy you may be getting in the form of soybean oil, soy lecithin, and soy sauce.  Once again, it pays to read labels.

The information contained in this write-up was obtained from an article published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry,”Phytoestrogen Content of Foods of Animal Origin: Dairy Products, Eggs, Meat, Fish, and Seafood” by Gunter G. C. Kuhnle et al, 2008, Vol 56

Carole Reed

Secretary, FDRS