Is Soy Bad For You?

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

It lurks in your cupboards, your cereal, bread, pasta and chips. It's in your refrigerator, in your cheese, condiments, yogurt, sausages, ice cream. It's in those M&M's by the desk, probably in the latte you're drinking right now.

It's soy, and it's now in almost every single processed food we buy at supermarkets and health food stores. As America's favorite "health food," it promises to make us skinny and lower our cholesterol, prevent cancer and reduce menopausal symptoms, put us in a better mood, give us energy. It's the cheap and guilt-free source of protein for millions of vegetarians, the "heart smart" option for carnivores, the infant formula du jour for eco-minded moms. Soy has become one of the America's biggest industries.

And it may be making us sicker than we've ever been. Or so alleges Kaayla Daniel, author of "The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America's Favorite Health Food," an anti-soy treatise released in 2005 by New Trends Publishing.

"People are just starting to wake up to this, to just how serious this all is," says Daniel, who earned her doctorate at the Union Institute and works as a certified nutritionist. "So far, if you look at the studies, you'll start to see that there are only possible benefits of this food, and proven dangers."

For Daniel, the problem exists in the soybean itself, a legume that by nature is chock full of antinutrients and toxins to ward off predators. If eaten in small amounts (say, a few tablespoons every couple of days) these toxins pose no real harm. The trouble occurs when we consume more than 35 grams of soy a day -- a quantity Daniel argues is easily reachable in our modern diet so crammed with soy meats, soy extenders, soy protein and soy emulsifiers, substances so full of estrogens, metals, sugars and additives, so "toxic," that they are posing considerable risks to our collective physical and mental health.

The farm lobby probably will not be too happy.