For years I was a vegetarian. I ate a lot of soy and soy based veggie-meat substitutes. I did it for health reasons. Boy, was I wrong!

A few years ago I started seeing a D.O. (Osteopathic Doctor) because I felt so exhausted. After a number of tests it was determined I had an under active thyroid and an allergy to soy. She added that most people were allergic to soy because it is in so many processed foods.

Today I received an email health alert from Dr. Mercola. (My holistic dentist recommended his website and so I signed up for his health alerts.) Today's alert was all about Dr. Daniel, the author of The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America’s Favorite Health Food, and the dangers of soy.

Why is soy so heavily promoted as a health food? Because it is BIG business. Like so many things in our society, if you "follow the money" you find soy has little to do with health and everything to do with increasing sales.

“One of the most effective things they [the soy industry] did was, some years ago, they recognized that they had a whole lot of soy that they wanted to sell, but they didn’t have a market for it because most people perceived soy products as something that was a communist food or fascist food. Or soy was perceived as a hippie food …

So either way soy did not have a good image and they got to thinking, “Well how can we make soy into an upscale food that people will want to buy and want to pay well for?” And what they did was absolutely brilliant. They came up with the idea of turning it into a health food. And that way rich people and upscale people would start to popularize it and the image would improve and then middle class and lower class people would want to eat it as well.

A soy heavy diet is detrimental enough for adults, causing among other things thyroid disorders, but it has even more drastic effects on children.  Soy based infant formula is especially harmful to the long term health of children.

Soy is bad enough for adults, but children and babies who are still developing are particularly vulnerable to soy’s hormone-mimicking effects. This means avoiding soy infant formula like the plague, and also not eating soy products if you are pregnant, is a health necessity.

Not only does soy infant formula have profoundly adverse hormonal effects, but it also has over 1,000 percent more aluminum than conventional milk-based formulas. Many soy foods also have toxic levels of manganese. Soy formula has up to 80 times higher manganese than is found in human breast milk.

In terms of the hormonal dangers, a Lancet study showed that the daily exposure to estrogen-imitating chemicals for infants who consume soy formulas was 6-11 times higher than adults consuming soy foods.

And the blood concentration of these hormones was 13,000 to 22,000 times higher than estrogen in the blood. An infant exclusively fed soy formula receives the estrogenic equivalent (based on body weight) of up to five birth control pills per day.

But don't take my word for it, look into this issue for yourself. Before you reach for that "Silk" soy milk, soy based energy bar, or worse yet, soy based infant formula, read and watch the YouTube in this link as well as Dr. Mercola's comments at the end.

Note: My holistic dentist informed me that the only soy products people should eat are tempeh and miso, both a fermented form of soy. The fermentation process removes the harmful affects of soy.

Links: 

Brookfield7, Fairly Conservative, Betterbrookfield, Mark Levin,  Vicki Mckenna