Tag: Soy

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The Truth About Soy: Healthy or Dangerous?

tofu

Reprinted with the permission of Bottom Line/Personal

Over the past few years, soy seems to have gone from one of the healthiest foods to one of the least healthy, with some health professionals accusing the bean of causing a wide range of problems, from thyroid damage to pancreatic cancer. Are they right? Should you avoid soy?

My viewpoint: Eating traditional foods such as miso, tofu and others in amounts eaten by Asian peoples for thousands of years not only poses no threat to health…but (according to thousands of scientific studies) may help protect you from many chronic diseases, including heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis and kidney disease.

On the other hand, eating some of the recently invented foods that are made from soy—and there are thousands of these—is a different story altogether.

What you need to know…

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Recipe: Lemon Broiled Tempeh

This is one of my favorite tempeh recipes. I created it several years ago, and enjoy it at least a couple of times a month. Toasted sesame oil adds a rich, nutty flavor; coconut oil is equally good and adds an Indonesian flavor to the dish. I like to serve this over steamed brown basmati rice. Serves 4.

Tempeh on Cutting Board Isolated in White

Ingredients:

1 12-ounce package tempeh
2 freshly squeezed lemons
2 tbsp. toasted sesame seed oil (or melted coconut oil)
2 tbsp. untoasted sesame seed oil
3 medium zucchini, sliced
2 cups shitake mushrooms, sliced
1 red pepper, cut into bite-sized pieces
1 large sliced onion
2 tbsp. tamari
Dash of ground pepper (black and/or crushed red pepper for some extra spice)

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Should You Eat Soy Foods?

Over the past few years, soy seems to have gone from the best food one can eat to the worst. According to soy opponents, tofu causes everything from birth defects to pancreatic cancer. It’s no wonder that people are concerned and confused.

In my opinion, there is a great deal of fear-mongering as well as inaccurate (and one-sided) interpretation of studies. Hundreds of reports in leading peer-reviewed journals worldwide provide compelling research that soy helps to protect against cancer, most notably breast cancer. For example, researchers at Japan’s National Cancer Center followed the eating habits of more than 20,000 women for a decade, and found that those who consumed at least three bowls of miso soup daily reduced their risk of breast cancer by about 40 percent. Miso (a concentrated fermented soybean paste) and all soy foods (as well as many other legumes) are rich in isoflavones, natural compounds that appear to impede the growth of some tumors.

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