Soy, To Eat or Not To Eat

There are people on both sides of this issue of whether or not it is good for a person to eat soy. My opinion is that it's all right if you eat small amounts and not every day of the week, month or year. Here are some reasons I don't like it.

Soy can be genetically modified (GMO) and we don't yet know what that will do to a person to eat GMO foods.

Soy can give you gas. I've read that soy protein is really not digestible and thus gives you flatulence. It certainly did that to me. The protein is much more edible if the soy has been fermented as in miso and tempeh. So, if you want to eat soy, probably eating miso and tempeh are much better for you. Recently, I've eaten a dish containing tempeh and soup with miso and did not experience the flatulence I get from drinking soy milk or eating a protein bar made with soy.

If you have any trouble with estrogen levels that are too high already or if the soy makes them too high, you probably don't want to eat soy. I had uterine fibroids and soy was one of the foods that caused my belly to bloat and the pain from the fibroids to worsen. Eating soy increased my menstrual blood flow. I know a woman who was 57 and still had periods. She loved soy foods and ate them in just about every form soy comes in and ate them several times a day. She was searching for a reason why she still had her period and decided to see if soy had something to do with it. When she stopped eating soy, her periods stopped. Was it the soy or coincidence? Some argue that the phytoestrogens in soy actually mediate a woman's estrogen levels, but that's not true from my own experience. I wanted to change my diet to vegan, all plant based food, but did not have much luck due to soy being the predominant food for vegans.

You do what you think is best for you. If I eat soy, it will be in the form of miso or tempeh. And I will be eating it only now and then, not regularly. If I still had my female organs, I probably would not eat it at all.