Soy: good, or bad?

[Eden]

Well..... Okinawans have, I think, about the highest life expectancy in the world and eat a diet high in soy...

[OakLeaf]

Well..... Okinawans have, I think, about the highest life expectancy in the world and eat a diet high in soy...

And that's the trouble with reductionist approaches. If there's even a true correlation between those two observations, it's also influenced by Okinawans' air, water, genetics, and the rest of their diet - all things that aren't shared by everyone who consumes large amounts of one particular component of Okinawans' diet.

Until quite recently, maybe even currently, doctors used to trot out cancer rates in Ramsar, Iran - where background radiation is extremely high - to "prove" that exposing other populations to radiation is perfectly safe. That's all being debunked now, but not before a lot of people developed cancer and other health problems from unnecessary CT scans, among other things. (Notice how they're taking the backscatter radiation machines out of airports too and claiming it's because of privacy concerns, right.)

We live in a synergistic world. Part of the lesson of that is that reductionist approaches to anything, ultimately turn out to have limited value in the real world. There's no magic food, and there's no demon food either (absent anaphylactic-type allergies, and with the big caveat that most people WILL benefit from eating super clean for an extended period of time). There's no lobby for a Varied Diet, so we're perpetually getting messages about this or that magic food.

I'm not that great about it either, but there are many, many reasons NOT to eat the same thing more than once or twice a week, whatever that same thing might be. And many, many reasons to eat real food always and avoid food-like substances with packaging and labels.