Wed, 04 Jan 2006

Soy diet worsens heart disease

You gotta love this:

"There are some very complex issues in this study that we don't yet fully understand from a biochemical standpoint," she [Professor Leslie Leinwand] said. "But the study should help lead to a better understanding of how genes and diet interact."

The fact that there are complex issues here should have been obvious - any biochemical system is necessarily complex, and I mean orders of magnitude more complex that comparable mechanical or electrical systems. Yet this complexity has not stopped dietitians and nutritionists from wholesale endorsement of soy as human food, so much so that soy milk replacement is now quite common. This is a relatively new thing in food science: traditional Asian foods made from soy (sauce, tofu, etc.) are made from fermented and/or curdled soy products, not from the straight up bean or oil. Yet we have willy-nilly replaced our traditional milk and dairy products with soy substitutes - milk has fat, after all, and therefore must be bad. After all, "you are what you eat"!

I'm changing my diet to $100 bills starting tomorrow ...

University of Colorado researchers have shown that mice carrying a genetic mutation linked to altered heart growth and function in humans, have significantly worse heart problems if fed a soy diet, when compared to mice fed a soy-free diet. This is the first study to provide evidence that an environmental influence - in this case diet - can affect the heart. It will also force researchers to rethink the diets of their laboratory mice.

(link) [EurekAlert!]

/Agriculture | 2 writebacks | permanent link

On 1/5/2006 06:04:11
Asahel wrote

On 1/5/2006 08:38:46
Dave H wrote

Wow!

comment...

 
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