soy

Some of you have asked me about soy, and here is the promised article on it.

Many people say that soy is good for you, because it acts as a weak estrogen that locks into the estrogen recepters on cells in the body, preventing the more powerful estrogen produced by the body from doing so. Here is a good summary of that argument. Thus it should be good for people who have fibroids, because we have too much estrogen in our system.

However, others have pointed out problems with soy. For me the first inkling that soy might not be the perfect wonder food it's made out to be in the media started with a reproductive endocrinologist I saw a couple of years back in my fibroid journey. She told me if nothing else I had to stop eating soy -- she had seen too many vegetarian patients where soy had set their hormones awry, with the problem resolving when they stopped eating the soy.

And indeed recently there is evidence that in our rush to add soy to everything, people are now getting too much. This article summarizes some of the problems with soy, and you can find more information in the book The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America's Favorite Health Food and in this article.

In my case, I am taking my own somewhat middle path.

First of all, I am avoiding soy milk, tofu, and anything made with isolated soy protein. As the article cited in the last paragraph puts it: "For American industry, the age-old Asian method of using the whole soybean and fermenting it to remove its toxins took too long and the end product was often dull and tasteless. To speedily process soy "waste" into soy protein products, U.S. soy producers washed beans with alkaline, heated and pressure-cooked them, combatting their naturally bitter taste with sugar and infusing them with additives to prevent spoiling." All the processing done to the various soy protein products commonly eaten in the U.S. (think soy hot dogs or all the soy in the average energy bar) takes the food pretty far away from its natural state.

Second, I am only eating whole soy fermented products, like natto, miso, and tempeh. As this article states, "Fermenting soy reduces the quantities of phytic acid (which can interfere with the absorption of minerals like calcium, iron and zinc) and renders the soy more digestible, in addition to providing beneficial microorganisms." Fermentation is the traditional Japanese way of eating soy, and they should know!

I'm also making sure not to eat too much soy. This article has a good discussion of this principle of moderation for soy. I just have it a couple of days a week, usually in the form of natto. As I've written elsewhere, natto contains enzymes that help dissolve fibrin, which is what fibroids are made of. It's also a good source of protein, and it's actually tasty if you drown it in barbecue sauce! If I had more time to cook, I would experiment more with tempeh, as actually it's pretty tasty as long as you can ignore its greyish color.

I am also being very careful to only eat organic soy, as soy is one of the most genetically-engineered products out there.

A final note, early on in my fibroid-fighting I was consuming a lot of soy. This was right after I read Healing Fibroids Naturally, which recommends soy as a good protein source for women with fibroids. Taking out the dairy and meat from my diet, I didn't know what else to eat and soy was easy especially since it's served at so many restaurants and one can get soy milk practically everywhere now. Eating soy helped me be more "normal" when eating with other people -- heck I could even get something at Starbucks. However, I think it was going overboard -- I probably had soy milk every day. Telling my current acupuncturist about this now, she says "all that soy milk, it was probably too much phlegm." And indeed this site supports that idea -- soy milk is one of the things to avoid if you have phlegm. And from a Chinese medicine perspective, phlegm seems to be a big issue in my fibroids.

Here are links to two other articles I wrote on soy after this one:  here and here.