A recent article on possible health risks of eating too much soy is making the internet rounds and scaring lots of people: Guardian Unlimited: Should We Worry About Soya In Our Food?
The answer from the Guardian is clearly yes -- you should worry. While it wouldn't be the first time that the food industry kept food risks hidden from consumers (as has possibly happened in certain cases with genetically modified foods), I'm skeptical of this article. It seems alarmist and is based largely on a single source -- a Dr. Mike Fitzpatrick from New Zealand. After a little searching I found his website, Soy Online Service, which assures us that it's run by private citizens without any outside funding.
Yet there's a whiff of conspiracy theory about this site. Similar material about the hidden dangers of soy can be found in such places as Nexus Magazine ("an international bi-monthly alternative news magazine, covering the fields of: Health Alternatives; Suppressed Science; Earth's Ancient Past; UFOs & the Unexplained; and Government Cover-Ups"). There's a lot of anti-soy material like this on the web, and it seems to go back at least ten years or so. Scanning it gives me the feeling I got a few years back when a friend tried to warn me off of Diet Coke. I naively looked to the web for answers. You can find an awful lot of people on the web convinced that aspartame will kill you, along with an awful lot of evidence that those people are kooks; mostly though, you'll just be exhausted from the effort.
Maybe there's something to this soy thing -- I don't know. Perhaps some well-intentioned people learned a little bit about toxicity (but not quite enough), got scared, and thus a webspiracy was born. This story could use some perspective from disinterested scientists (I don't think Fitzpatrick counts -- he may not make money off of this, but he has surely staked his career on it).
Update: A little more Googling and I'm convinced this is conspiracy territory. (Other people probably realized this immediately -- I guess I'm a little slow.) I don't know what the Guardian's reputation is for accuracy, but I think it's safe to say they slipped up here. There's apparently quite a history of anti-soy fearmongering. I'll leave the Googling as an exercise for the reader.
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