Soy: Not So Fast
Monday August 4, 2008
Annemarie Colbin, Ph.D., CHES contributes the fascinating "Food Doctor" blog to the What Doctors Don't Tell You / WDDTY website and blog. I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Colbin earlier this year. She is an award-winning leader in the field of natural health, and is founder of the Natural Gourmet Institute for Health and Culinary Arts in New York City. She's also a nutrition professor, and author of a number of popular books on food and health.
Dr. Colbin has just added a terrific new blog post about soy, looking at its effects on health, including the thyroid. It's definitely worth reading.
You can also find out more about Dr. Annemarie Colbin at her website www.foodandhealing.com.
Photo: clipart.com
Comments
I am hypothyroid and initially thought soy consumption was implicated in my problems. I stopped eating anything with soy in it for a couple years. Recently I have added back in soy to my diet. However, I eat soy in a traditional Asian way – a little bit of tofu (1-4 oz/day), tempeh now and then, and high end organic Shoyu (soy sauce made w/o wheat in the traditional way). I find that a little soy is good for me, good for my heart health, and doesn’t seem to affect my thyroid functioning at all. Same for tea, which I also gave up due to the anti-thyroid effects of fluoride (which is naturally concentrated in the tea plant).
I think it is important when trying to deal with thyroid issues via diet to experiment and not get paranoid about food. Even though I have been looking for years I have yet to find an authoritative source listing measures of exactly how much eating a certain food reduces thyroxin levels – for instance if if I eat 4 oz of tofu, then how much is my Levoxyl dose effectively reduced by? 25mcg 50mcg, 5mcg, .05 mcg? No one has been able to say to my knowledge. My guess is that the effective reduction is pretty small – maybe in the .05 – 3 mcg range – at least for me.
I think the real problems with food come with sensitivities which cause inflammation in the body. While these are small effects, they are cumulative over time and can lead to thyroid damage. I would encourage everyone to get tested for IgG reaction to food and to adjust their diet accordingly. When I did this and found no reaction to soy I added it back in even as I removed things like wheat and dairy where I had high a high reaction. Now I feel much better. I believe this more complex, nuanced approach is better than just removing potentially healthy food from the diet because of its supposed anti-thyroxin properties – especially as these effects are not well quantified.
Since the Japanese are the longest living people in the world (despite their high rate of smoking and drinking), as well as the known good qualities of the diets of other Asian countries, I think the Asian way of eating is worth trying to emulate.
I couldn’t agree more on avoiding processed, genetically engineered, or non-organic food, both for soy and everything else.
Great comment!