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Soy and Health

Soy has long been recognized as a highly nutritious food. Western scientists became particularly interested in soy when they noticed that people eating Asian diets enjoyed lower rates of heart disease as well as less cancer and osteoporosis, and had fewer hormonal problems than those eating a typical Western diet. There is now broad scientific agreement on various positive connections between soy and health.

Soy’s most conclusively demonstrated benefit concerns cardiovascular health. There have been extensive studies on the cholesterol-lowering effect of soy in our regular diet. One frequently cited study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1995, describes an analysis of thirty-eight different studies. The authors found that regular consumption of soy protein resulted in significant reductions in total cholesterol (9.3 percent), LDL cholesterol (12.9 percent), and triglycerides (10.5 percent) with a small though not significant increase in HDL cholesterol. A recent study (March 2003) in the Journal of Nutritiondemonstrated that the intake of soy foods among the pre-menopausal subjects was inversely related to their risk for coronary artery disease and stroke as well as other disorders. Similar studies have demonstrated the same effect with people with diabetes and people with high cholesterol.