Soy Is The Devil, And Not In A Fun Way

The mythology of the Devil is actually pretty fascinating.  I'm not going to spend an hour recounting the entire etymology of the word Satan, the historical concept of the Devil, or pantheistic demonology, though I assure you, that shit is tremendously interesting.  Once you've followed every link you can from that one, you'll have a clear understanding of what the Devil represents- pure evil.  Across every Mediterranean-based religion since ancient Egypt, however, there's existed a malevolent energy or god with which people then and now have concerned themselves.  Innumerable methods have been articulated for ridding themselves of this evil, ranging from exorcisms to jihad to a hell of a lot of prayer.  I'm not advocating any of that, and I'm informing you about a much greater evil than the entity who is conventionally referred to as the Devil- I'm referring to soy.  Would an exorcism help?  Likely not, but there are some executives at Ralston-Purina and DuPont who could do with some stabbing.

The devil in a fun way.

For those of you who are unaware, there's currently a massive push to get soy into the diets of Americans, allegedly due to the magical health-improving effects of the soybean.  Apparently positing that the American diet is bereft of soy, and that the Chinese and Japanese can fly, live to 200 years of age, and never get cancer due to their constant inhalation of so, various special interest groups have funded studies alleging this bean's magical properties.  This is, of course, utter horseshit.

1. Americans eat far more soy, per capita, than any other people on Earth.  In 2005, Americans ate 25,261,750 tons of soy.  That breaks down to 0.0852255847 tons of soy a year (25,261,750/296,410,404), or 170 lbs a year.  The Chinese, by comparison, ate only (50957450 / 1315844000) 0.0387260572 tons per person, or 77 lbs.  This is fucking retarded.(Swivel for the soy, and Wikipedia for the population)
2. According to health activist and occasional kook Joseph Mercola, soy may increase the risk of breast cancer in women, brain damage in both men and women, and abnormalities in infants, contribute to thyroid disorders (especially in women), promote kidney stones, weaken the immune system, and cause severe, potentially fatal food allergies. (Mercola)
3. Soy contains isoflavones, plant hormones that have been shown to have an estrogenic effect on the body (it mimics the actions of estrogen, which reduces test levels and inhibit muscular hypertrophy. (Nutrient Timing, 128)
4. Biological changes in the function of sex glands, central nervous system, and thyroid are attributable to soy isoflavones.  Soy also contains phytic acid, an anti-nutrient that blocks the uptake of calcium, zinc, and magnesium.  Low zinc throws copper levels out of balance, and high levels of copper can depress thyroid function. (Crazy Makers, 81-82)
5. Many beans contain toxic compounds designed to dissuade animals from eating them, and soybeans are no different.  Raw soybeans contain antienzymes, hemagglutinin, phytates and goitrogens, which will have varying effects on people based on the biological individuality, but are toxic nonetheless.  (Neanderthin, 56)

I realize that at this point, half of you are scoffing at these claims, having eaten soy your entire lives, and immense amounts of it.  Before you get too haughty, consider this- Americans are fatter, less libidinous, weaker, and more pathetic than ever, and we're eating unprecedented amounts of soy.

Why are we eating so much soy?  Because agribusiness is filled with evil assholes who hate you, and they line the pockets of politicians who also hate you and are looking for ways to make you more dependent on them, so that the politicians will do what they'd do on their own a little more quickly.  According to Joseph Mercola, soy began in the US as a product that in 1913 was listed in the U.S. Department of Agriculture as an industrial product, rather than a food.  (Mercola)  Although the soybean was introduced in the US a couple centuries prior to that, it didn't really carry much weight until is was picked up by none other than Henry Ford as a super-bean he primarily used to make plastics and textiles- Ford bragged that two bushels of soybeans went into each car he sold, and even wore a suit made of faux silk (made of soy) on a daily basis. This fiber never really caught on, having been beaten by DuPont's nylon, but illustrates the fact that soy was initially considered to be primarily for industrial use.  Ford's experimentation with soy milk eventually led to Ralston-Purina's widespread use of soy in animal feed, due in large part to the fact that soy is incredibly cheap to farm and process.  

18 year old, hot as fuck Swedish chicks could kick most American males' asses.

As the years passed, and soy made its slow transition into the American diet, that industry received a welcome boost from the findings of the Club of Rome, a global think tank who focusses on political issues, and wishes "to act as a global catalyst for change through the identification and analysis of the crucial problems facing humanity and the communication of such problems to the most important public and private decision makers as well as to the general public."(Wikipedia)  The Club produced their seminal work in 1972, called the Limits to Growth, which was essentially a dire prediction that the Earth's industrialized societies would collapse under their own weight and the combined scarcity of petroleum and food.  This book was an outgrowth of the Malthusian catastrophe theory of Thomas Malthus, which "was originally foreseen to be a forced return to subsistence-level conditions once population growth had outpaced agricultural production," and it led to a variety of well-received and well-regarded works of Malthusian dystopic fiction.  The two best-known works in this genre are The Wanting Seed, by Anthony Burgess, and Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, both of which depict a future Earth plagued by overpopulation.  Both books are fucking awesome, by the way, if you like dystopic fiction, and Harrison's book was made into the epic Soylent Green.  From works like these, people picked up the notion that meat would eventually be impossible to come by or unbelievably expensive (see just about any science fiction novel written in the last 30 years for evidence of this) and nearly all of which prophesied that soy would be the meat of the future.

In I Come In Peace, Dolph protects us from a likely soy-loving evil alien.

This momentum made it easy for companies like Ralston-Purina and DuPont to ramp up their soy production, and start fleecing the fuck out of our politicians.  The politicians, greedy, soulless sacks of shit that they are, eventually changed the protein rating systems to make soy look good, which afforded those companies the opportunity to make ridiculous claims about the bioavailability of soy.  (Body Opus, 76)  Lobbyists are the reason there are so many different rating systems for protein- not scientists.  To wit, there are the following rating systems for protein:


Biological value (BV)
Net protein Utilization (NPU)
Protein Efficiency Ratio (PER)
Nitrogen Balance (NB)
Protein digestibility (PD)
Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score (PDCAAS)

Just within BV, you can get two different rankings for protein, one of which places soy at the same level as whey for bioavailability, and another that ranks it at about 3/4 of whey.  PDCAAS is the newest, and thus ranks soy on par with egg, whey, and casein, while NPU, one of the oldest, ranks whey at 92 and soy at 61.  Suspicious?  I sure as fuck am.

Up next- Will soy make men's cocks fall off and have them grow tits, and will it make women even womenier?  Studies have shown that it might...

Another pic of the above chick- Sarah Bäckman, Swedish National armwrestling champ, and painfully, ridiculously hot chick who would rip your arm off and beat you to death with it, given a reason to do so.

Sources:
Joseph Mercola.  http://mercola.com/2004/jan/21/soy.htm
Ivy, John.  Nutrient Timing
Simontacchi, Carol.  The Crazy Makers: How the Food Industry is Destroying our Brains and Hurting our Children.
Audette, Ray.  Neanderthin.
Duchaine, Dan.  Body Opus.