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Soy to the World
In the '60's, soy was to save the planet. Now, they say it just might save your life.
by Liza Goodwin

In the 1963 edition ofJoy of Cooking, there are only two soybean recipes, one of them for soy milk, which the authors obviously didn't expect to become a reader £lvorite. The directions are impossibly timeconsuming, and if that's not enough, the Rombauer mother-and-daughter team almost begs us not to try making the stuff at home: Soy milk is mainly used for "feeding babies in the Orient," they assert. Soy would not get its due for another decade, when The Book of Tofu "awakened the West to the wonders" of the curd, as The New York Times proclaimed in 1978. Authors William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi argued that if we ate cheaper-toproduce soy instead of meat for protein, we'd feed more oftl1e world's starving. Their soy manifesto called for a tofu shop on every corner, a network of culinary revolutionaries to churn out a steady supply of the globally correct food. It is a truth universally acknowledged, however, that people in possession of abundant resources will eat whatever they danm well please unless they fear personal consequences. And these days, soy is getting attention for its potential to save not the world but your life--or at least to make things a lot more pleasant while you're here. "Soybeans seem to ease menopause," newspapers around the country were declaring last fall. And there was more; indeed, to the (mostly male) experts, a more comfortable menopause doesn't amount to a hill of beans in contrast to soy's promise in other areas. Soy is the only common food to contain enough isoflavones, a plant form of estrogen, to put disease prevention in the realm of possibility, they say. Indeed, when nutritionist Mark Messina, PhD, hears about the menopause headlines, he mutters something about the "placebo effect"-one study, it seems, showed that wheat flour was just as effective as soy at reducing hot flashes-and then abruptly changes the subject: He wants to talk about what he considers the more exciting news to come out oflast fall's Second International Soy Symposium, which attracted 400 scientists to Brussels. First, soy and osteoporosis: Sixty-six postmenopausal women who for six months ate soy as part of low-fat, low-cholesterol diet gained bone density, a University of Illinois dietician found. Second, soy and cholesterol: A review of thirty-eight clinical trials by a University of Kentucky physician determined that soy protein may protect us fi:om heart disease by reducing the amount of "bad" LDL cholesterol and raising "good" HDL cholesterol. Finally, soy and breast cancer: Hopes ran high after a study in the early '90s showed that breast-cancer cells spiked in a petri dish with a specific soy isoflavone, genistein, multiplied more slowly than untreated cells. But William Helferich, MD, of Mishigan State University, reported at the sympo-sium that the size of breast-cancer tumors in mice increased when they were given genistein. In other words, the estrogen in soy might work something like the pharmaceutical estrogen in hormone-replacement therapy: It may lower the risk of heart disease and osteoporosis and alleviate hot flashes, but raise the risk of breast cancer. Helferich's findings are by no means the last word on soy and breast cancer, however; the £lct remains that women in Japan and China-who eat soy regularly-have far lower rates of breast cancer than women here. And, as for menopausal symptoms, anyone who's knocked around the women's-health world has heard that the Japanese don't have a term for hot flash. Could it be their soy-rich diet keeps that noxious symptom at bay? The glorious prospects for the small, round legun1e inspire mote and more feverish researchover 700 published studies in the past few years. For healthy women with menopausal symptoms, the early consensus is to try two servings of soy (a cup of tofu or tempeh or two cups of soy milk) a day. To lower cholesterol, at least two or three servings are recommended. If you don't like plain tofu but want to eat more of it, check out one of the creative new cookbooks devoted to the bean-Soy! (Prima) and Estrogen: the Natural Way (Villard)--or the new edition of Joy of Cooking, due this fall, which will include a dozen soy-based recipes.

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