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A Rant about Soy

There is a conspiracy going on and you know about it. -- Offonoff, in ZBS's Ruby

There's something very wrong in this world and it's soy.

Bear with me. It started coming to my attention a few years ago while visiting a friend in Oregon. Up until that time I'd been blissfully ignorant of soy. It was a bean that had a lot of protein. Vegetarians liked it. My mother cooked using soy sauce.

During the visit, two incidents happened that forced me to start re-evaluating just how harmless soy was:

1. We were in a supermarket and my friend had bought a few small containers of yogurt, including lemon. On closer inspection, we realized that the lemon one wasn't yogurt at all! It was a soy counterfeit cleverly packaged to look like yogurt.

2. Later, my friend revealed that most soy sauces weren't made from soy. They're made from wheat.

This all seemed slightly sinister. Soy masquerading as another food, but not even in a food that bears its name? What do soy have to hide, sneaking out of soy sauce and into other food?

Since then things have just gone downhill. I've moved to that town in Oregon, and noticed a few more things. It's nothing major, just little things:

• Vegetarian "burgers" that are advertised as "soy-free". What do they know that we don't? Do even vegetarians believe soy is harmful?

• There's talk of building a soy sauce factory just south of this town. It's probably just politics, but can we be sure they do not have sinister designs on this town?

That's really all there is. Just remember this: most food these days is made with fillers, and that filler is probably soy. If you've eaten in the past day, you've probably had some.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

Postscript

1996-07-10. A reader who wishes to remain anonymous sent this:

Soy contains phytoestrogens, natural plant chemicals that mimic the functions of female sex hormones in animals. Cattle ranchers are careful not to feed their animals too much soy because it can screw up their natural hormonal balances and mess with reproduction, milk production, normal development, etc. For some reason, humans don't worry about this in our own diets, pumping babies full of soy-based formula from the day they come out and adding soy to virtually everything... and one wonders why the hairy chest seems sometimes like an endangered species!

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