Meat or Soy: Will the Real Cause of Bone Loss Please Stand Up? Meat or Soy: Will the Real Cause of Bone Loss Please Stand Up?
Meat or Soy: Will the Real Cause of ... 
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The soy industry has done it’s best to fan women’s fears about bone loss, blame meat for the osteoporosis epidemic and promote soy milk and other products as the solution.
Consumers who bone up on the issue, however, will find that soy has only a rickety leg to stand on.
And the soy industry itself knows this!
Between 2001 and 2005, I attended three symposia sponsored by the soy industry entitled “The Role of Soy in the Prevention and Treatment of Chronic Disease,” where I had the pleasure of watching embarrassed researchers squirm as they apologized for their failure to find a consistent bone-sparing effect and try to explain that the dose must have been either “suboptimal” or “excessive.”
In other words, they all know soy “works” . . . now if they could only find the perfect dose, correct formula or right age to initiate preventive treatment!
In 2006, very bad news came for the soy industry when Yale researchers writing for the Journal of Nutrition concluded:
“These data indicate that when soy protein is substituted for meat protein, there is an acute decline in dietary calcium bioavailability.”
This finding, of course, should have exploded once and for all the myth that eating meat and eggs results in a loss of calcium, leading the body to strip calcium from storage in the bones, ultimately causing osteopenia or osteoporosis.
But no such luck.
To this day the myth gets repeated, and if any science is cited at all, it’s most likely from an article that ran in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism back in 1988. Let’s talk about that one:
The study involved 15 healthy young people, divided into three groups. All three groups ate foods that contained identical amounts of sodium, potassium, calcium, phosphorous, magnesium and protein, but differing amounts of sulfur.
The first group (least sulfur) consumed soy products; the second (moderate sulfur) consumed soy milk, texturized soy protein, cheese and eggs; and the third (most sulfur) consumed animal protein from meat and cheese. Those who got their protein from the animal products lost 50 percent more calcium from their bodies than did those who had only soy protein.
The soy, egg and dairy people were in the middle. The researchers concluded, “The inability to compensate for the animal protein-induced calciuric response (calcium in the urine) may be a risk factor for the development of osteoporosis.”
When this study comes up — which it often does in the pro plant-based diet literature – the authors never mention that the 15 subjects spent a grand total of 12 days testing each type of food. This was just enough time for their bodies to react to unexpectedly high levels of sulfur proteins, but not enough time for the body to normalize and handle the sulfur load.
Calcium homeostasis is normally well regulated so that increased calcium loss through the urine results in increased calcium absorption from the gut. This adaptive process may fail to occur during short-term studies, though the human body is more than capable of adjusting to the sulfur load of real foods when given a proper time frame.
The fallacy of most other studies linking sulfur-rich animals foods to high calcium excretion is equally easy to find. The majority of the experiments feature overdoses of the isolated amino acids methionine, cysteine and cystine without providing adequate levels of vitamin B6 and the extra hydrochloric acid needed to process this high amino acid load.
Notably, people and animals fed Real Food have not experienced the same problems.
The B6 issue is critical because the active form of B6 (pyridoxal-5-phosphate) is the coenzyme for the enzyme needed for proper conversion of sulfur-containing amino acids (cystathionine synthetase). The best and most available sources of vitamin B6 are raw animal foods, such as raw meat, raw milk and raw cheese. As it happens, these foods are also good sources of usable sulfur.
To date, only one study convincingly suggests that soy might prevent osteoporosis.
Published in the May 2006 issue of Journal of Nutrition, it pertains to natto, a fermented Japanese soybean product rarely sold in the U.S. In the case of natto, the bone building doesn’t come from the miracle bean itself, but from the Vitamin K2 manufactured by the bacteria involved in the fermentation process.
Vitamin K2 is crucial for bone health and conspicuously absent from soy milk or any other modern soybean products. But don’t expect to find natto in the stores anytime soon as few Americans appreciate its sticky coat, cheesy texture, musty taste, sliminess, stringiness and pungent odor.
Butter and lacto-fermented foods like sauerkraut are the best sources of vitamin K2 in western diets.
As for soy milk and other modern soy products, more than 70 years of studies link soy to thyroid problems, particularly hypothyroidism with its familiar symptoms of weight gain, fatigue, malaise and lethargy. Hypothyroidism itself is a known risk factor for osteoporosis.
Soy proponents, of course, believe the phytoestrogens in soy promote bone health.
While it’s true that estrogen receptors are found in bone, soy phytoestrogens are not true estrogens and don’t reliably activate them. In any case, the key hormone for bone health is not estrogen but progesterone. In that American women most often suffer from estrogen dominance and progesterone deficiency, soy phytoestrogens aren’t likely to help. And there aren’t any soy phytoprogesterones.
Last summer, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) put the kibosh on proposed health claims that soy stops osteoporosis. Of the fourteen studies submitted by the soy industry, EFSA found only two that showed a possible benefit.
Those two reported an effect of soy isoflavones at doses of 54 mg per day at the lumbar spine and femoral neck, which was accompanied by a significant increase in markers of bone formation and a significant decrease in markers of bone resorption. However, the panel noted that such changes in BMD at the lumbar spine seen in short term studies (six to nine months) could have “resulted from a change in the remodeling balance which may not be retained in subsequent remodeling cycles” and that “the evidence for a mechanism by which soy isoflavones may exert an effect on bone mass and turnover in post-menopausal women is weak.”
As for the other 12 studies, they did not support bone health despite dosages of soy isoflavones as high as 200 mg per day. The soy industry DE CLAREd it was “surprised” and “disappointed.”
Disappointed? Of course. Surprised? Hardly.
EFSA had earlier rejected three petitions for a soy/heart disease health for similar reasons.
The takeaway? Other than the vitamin K2 found abundantly in natto, soybean products have little to offer our bones and much to harm them.
So you got the memo that soy is very bad for the hormonal system.
If you think that is the extent of the damage the lowly soybean can wreak on your health, you may be surprised to learn that soybeans are also notoriously hard to digest with GMO soybeans – widely used in processed foods – the absolute worst.
The culprit is the protease inhibitors found in all soybeans whether organic or GMO. As the name suggests, protease inhibitors suppress some of the key enzymes that help us digest protein.
The best known and most important of the protease inhibitors is trypsin. GMO soybeans have more of them than organic or conventional beans, and to make matters worse, those protease inhibitors are stubbornly resistant to deactivation by cooking or other processing methods.
Soybeans are not the only foods that contain protease inhibitors. All beans contain them, as do grains, nuts, seeds, vegetables of the nightshade family, egg whites, and other foods. However, the protease inhibitors in those foods rarely contribute to health problems because few of those foods are eaten excessively and cooking deactivates most of them.
In contrast, there are more protease inhibitors in soybeans than in any other commonly eaten food. While protease inhibitors are not a problem for people who enjoy the occasional soy dish, the quantities add up quickly when people consume soy daily in the mistaken belief that it is a “healthy” meat and dairy substitute.
For decades, USDA and other researchers put their efforts into finding safe and inexpensive ways to deactivate the protease inhibitors found in soy. Boiling, roasting and modern processing methods help, but cannot destroy all of these troublesome components. The only way to come close is through the old-fashioned fermentation methods used to make miso, tempeh and natto. Modern industrial processing techniques involving heat, pressure and chemical treatments have been reported to kill off as much as 80 to 90 percent, but that’s a promise, not a guarantee.
The numbers of live protease inhibitors remaining in soy products varies from batch to batch, and investigators have found unexpectedly high levels of protease inhibitors present in some soy foods, and startlingly high levels in some soy formulas.
Protease inhibitors are an especially bad problem in GMO soybeans. With more than ninety percent of commercial soybean crops now genetically modified — up from around fifty percent in 2007 — there are very real health risks. Monsanto, of course, claims these beans are substantially equivalent to the conventional soybean, hence safe.
In fact, tests have shown significantly higher concentrations of protease inhibitors in the toasted GMO soybean compared to conventional soybeans. Furthermore, those found in the GMO strain proved stubbornly resistant to deactivation by the heat treatment known as “toasting.”
When the results first came in, Monsanto took the bad news to mean that the GM beans had not been properly cooked and asked for retreatment of the sample. Further heating, however, widened the difference even more. The logical conclusion would be that a substantial difference exists between the GMO and conventional soybeans, and that the GMO soybean is more likely to cause digestive distress and growth problems in humans and animals.
Monsanto, however, concluded that the second toasting was still not enough and toasted twice more until they got the result they wanted, namely that ALL proteins were denatured and inactivated. At this point, most of the soybean’s protein value was also
destroyed, but it gave Monsanto the “proof” it needed to conclude that where protease inhibitors were concerned, GM and normal soybeans were equivalent.
Why be concerned about protease inhibitors? They are the reason soybeans are notoriously hard to digest, and why soybean consumption stresses the pancreas. Because the protease inhibitors in soy inhibit the protease enzyme we need to digest protein, the pancreas has to work overtime to produce more. If this happens only occasionally, the pancreas quickly recovers. But if soy is consumed day after day, week after week, year after year, there will be no rest for the weary pancreas. The result is an increase of both the number of pancreatic cells (hyperplasia) and the size of those cells (hypertrophy).
The extent of soy-caused pancreatic hypertrophy and hyperplasia varies widely from species to species in the animal kingdom. In some soy-fed animals, the pancreas swells quickly, in others more slowly, and in some not at all. However, all animals – including the human animal — will suffer from the loss of the ability to secrete sufficient enzymes if regularly consuming protease inhibitors. That means digestive distress for nearly everyone and growth problems for the young.
With pancreatic stress and cell proliferation, cancer becomes a distinct possibility. Pancreatic cancer currently ranks as the fourth leading cause of cancer deaths of men and women in the United States, and is predicted to move into second place by 2020. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, researchers studying damage to the pancreas caused by protease inhibitors noted that pancreatic cancer had then moved up to fifth place, and suggested a soybean-protease inhibitor connection. Since then the rise has been even more alarming.
The fact that it has occurred along with increased human consumption of soybeans — and over the past decade GMO soybeans — is probably not coincidental. Association, of course, does not prove cause and effect, but looking at the rise of pancreatic cancer alongside the evidence of so many animal studies is suggestive and sobering.
Irvin Liener, PhD, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota and the world’s leading expert on anti-nutrients and toxins in plant foods, sums it up well, “Soybean trypsin inhibitors do in fact pose a potential risk to humans when soy protein is incorporated into the diet.”
For a full discussion and references, read Chapter 16: Protease Inhibitors, Tryping on Soy in The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America’s Favorite Health Food by Kaayla T. Daniel, PhD (New Trends, 2005)
