Too much Soymilk?

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lizzyjgv
lizzyjgv Posts: 10
in Food and Nutrition
hello all...
i just want to know if im drinking too much soymilk because i usually have 2-4 glasses daily.
i use it with cereals, fruit and protein shakes. i know too much of something can be bad since ive noticed
i always have excess protein in my daily meals...
any ideas, thoughts could be great... thanks!

Replies

  • igora_soma
    igora_soma Posts: 486
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    If you have a history of breast cancer in the family it's not the best. I used to drink a lot but now I altnerate with almond milk. I highly recommend it. It's delicious and low cal!!
  • CraftyGirl4
    CraftyGirl4 Posts: 571 Member
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    I don't think you can really have too much as long as you are getting enough of everything else - fruits, vegetables, fats, grains, other lean protein. Soy is a source of complete protein so that's fabulous for you.
  • HoopFire5602
    HoopFire5602 Posts: 423 Member
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    The protein limi ton MFP is too low. You should be eating 0.5-1 gram of protein per lb of body weight, expecially more if you lift weights often. I don't see anything wrong with it...it's better than soda. :)
  • JasonsWeightliftingWife
    JasonsWeightliftingWife Posts: 59 Member
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    I would say make your own almond mik or other nut milk. You can also use coconut milk. There are many studies showing that soy is not good for humans. Tofu, Tempeh, and whole soy can be okay sometimes. But I just try to avoid it as much as possible.

    www.naturalnews.com has many articles on this subject.

    Good luck
  • akork
    akork Posts: 31
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    Not sure what you mean by "to much protein." If you have a daily caloric intake goal and you are meeting that goal then there is no problem. If you are exceeding that and think you are getting more than enough protein by all means cut back. Any protein past what your body needs for maintenance will just be metabolized for energy and there is nothing wrong with getting your energy from protein. Protein is very filling compared to the amount of calories so the more protein you are having the easier it will be to cut back on your intake. If soy milk is what you enjoy I see no problem drinking that much. If you are having difficulty meeting a certain calorie intake goal though you might want to consider eating more calories and drinking less, you will get a more full satisfied feeling from eating your calories than drinking them.
  • Kristhin
    Kristhin Posts: 442 Member
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    It isn't any worse for you than real milk --caesin is linked to cancer.
    I would make sure you buy organic soy milk so that way it isn't GMO.
    Too much of lots of things can be bad for you, so I'd say buy soy milk sometimes, then buy almond milk others.
  • akork
    akork Posts: 31
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    There is no connection between soy milk and breast cancer, don't worry about that.
  • PeachyKeene
    PeachyKeene Posts: 1,645 Member
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    http://thyroid.about.com/cs/soyinfo/a/soy.htm

    http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/soya.asp

    http://www.optimumchoices.com/Soy.htm

    http://www.savvyvegetarian.com/articles/soy-truth.php

    And there are many, many more. Just google it.
  • akork
    akork Posts: 31
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    Honestly I don't see any coorelatives in epidemiological journals between "casein" and cancer either other than one discredited study by a guy named Cambell, where did you get that statistic? Actually there are more articles suggesting that the opposite is true and that casein protein is antimutagenic, however I would doubt that as well considering the error inherient in the sample size.

    Also what is wrong with GMO's exactly. I mean are all GMO's bad, did you have a particular GMO in mind?
  • akork
    akork Posts: 31
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    None of those are epidemioligical studies carried out in a scientific manner PeachyKeene...don't beleive everything you read on the internet.

    I mean look at your sources, all of them are .coms

    About.com..number of scientific studies quoted: zero
    Snopes.com, a site dedicated to rumors
    Optimum choices: yet another .com

    There are dietary fear fads that come and go and I really recommend ignorning them unless there is actually a scientific epidemiological study behind them that shows a strong coorelative.

    The only scientific study they quote out of any of those links is this one

    "Dashwood RH. Indole-3-carbinol: anticarcinogen or tumor promoter in brassica vegetables? Chem Biol Interact 1998; 110:1-5. "

    I think just by reading the title you can see why that isn't really the study that is going to convince me there is a connection between soy milk and cancer in humans.

    If you are going to link a source make sure its an unbiased one. To do so make sure its not a .com first of all and try to pull something from a scientific source. See if you can find an article here linking casein or soy to cancer via an epidemiological study of sufficient sample size in humans, I sure can't. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/
  • lizzyjgv
    lizzyjgv Posts: 10
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    thank you all for the interesting insights... i checked my food diary and so far i am only consuming excess 5 - 45 grams of protein.
    i really love drinking soymilk and yes it is way better than drinking soda, but now that ive read a couple of articles you guys posted,
    maybe i should cut back on drinking it. maybe 2-3 glasses a day would be fine? I drink Organic Silk Soymilk so i guess that would be ok then, but it has 6 grams of sugar per glass and in my food diary i consume an excess of 10 - 20 grams of sugar and i think the soymilk has something to do with it... lol i tried to drink the almond milk before too, maybe i should bring it back to my diet as well =)
  • akork
    akork Posts: 31
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    I really don't understand how posting an article on the internet makes the person posting it somehow more believable. I've gone through about 10 of these soy-milk is bad for you articles and absolutely none of them have quoted a single study on soy milk in humans. They are all opinion pieces. Now those people are certainly entitled to their opinion and I will even state that for all I know they may be right, but that is all it is...an opinion, there was no study. In rare cases they will reference something but I'd invite you to actually follow up on that reference and see where it leads. I would really recommend not changing your diet solely due to concerns of a particular food being "dangerous" because someone has a blog and wrote that it was.

    Now if you have concerns that you drink to much soy milk because its good and easy to drink and you end up having a higher carb load (as you mentioned) or more calories than you want then yeah by all means cut back, but don't let someones online opinion scare you out of a food you enjoy unless there is some basis for it.

    To see what I mean name a food any food and then look for a blog or an about.com entry or some online op-ed about how bad that food is for you, you will find it. The internet is rife with these opinon pieces that are based on pretty much nothing at all or maybe one scientific study that if you actually read the journal itself doesn't actually apply.

    Sorry to harp on this its just a pet peeve of mine as a scientist.
  • PeachyKeene
    PeachyKeene Posts: 1,645 Member
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    None of those are epidemioligical studies carried out in a scientific manner PeachyKeene...don't beleive everything you read on the internet.

    I mean look at your sources, all of them are .coms

    About.com..number of scientific studies quoted: zero
    Snopes.com, a site dedicated to rumors
    Optimum choices: yet another .com

    There are dietary fear fads that come and go and I really recommend ignorning them unless there is actually a scientific epidemiological study behind them that shows a strong coorelative.

    The only scientific study they quote out of any of those links is this one

    "Dashwood RH. Indole-3-carbinol: anticarcinogen or tumor promoter in brassica vegetables? Chem Biol Interact 1998; 110:1-5. "

    I think just by reading the title you can see why that isn't really the study that is going to convince me there is a connection between soy milk and cancer in humans.

    If you are going to link a source make sure its an unbiased one. To do so make sure its not a .com first of all and try to pull something from a scientific source. See if you can find an article here linking casein or soy to cancer via an epidemiological study of sufficient sample size in humans, I sure can't. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/

    My point was the OP can google her question and get all sorts of information, that is just as reliable or not as anything she is going to get here. She needs to research it, you nor I have the answers, I never said it was one way or the other. I just picked the the first four that came up when I copied her topic in google.

    Another thing, do you think the government isn't biased.

    OP - have you tried Almond Milk? I really like the unsweetened one. I have a hypothyroid so my doctor recommends staying away from Soy. It is bad for the Thyroid according to a professional.
  • akork
    akork Posts: 31
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    "do you think the government isn't biased."

    No I do not believe the scientific community is biased. The .gov link I provided is pubmed, the free online collection of scientific journals. The goverment via the National Institute of Health provides the capital to host the articles but all the articles on that site are from peer reviewed scientific journals. Its about as unbiased as you can get from humans. It is certainly better than a .com or a .org.

    "My point was the OP can google her question and get all sorts of information, that is just as reliable or not as anything she is going to get here"

    I totally agree. I just have a pet peeve against what I see as fear-mongering based on online articles about the "dangers" of foods that when you dig into them you can see they just boil down to some persons opinion and aren't based on any sort of unbiased study. I think it adds a lot of unneccesary stress to what should be an enjoyable experience of looking after yourself. I don't meant to be rude and I apologize if anything I said came across as such.

    Also don't get me wrong I certainly wouldn't contramand your doctor's advice but in my opinion doctors are just individual people and they tend to be swayed by mear hints in the literature that something might have ill effects before any solid study is actually performed. I mean I don't disagree, by all means error on the side of caution. In otherwords in your place I'd probably do what my doctor said to do because I may as well but I wouldn't really believe that either until I saw some evidence. A quick glance at the literature shows that in rodents fed soy as their ONLY source of protein that there was a significant but small decrease in T4 thyroid levels but I see nothing based on a diet supplmeneted or including soy in addition to other sources of protein nor any epidemiological studies performed in humans.

    Of course, I'm just a person with opinions as well :-).
  • PeachyKeene
    PeachyKeene Posts: 1,645 Member
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    "do you think the government isn't biased."

    No I do not believe the scientific community is biased. The .gov link I provided is pubmed, the free online collection of scientific journals. The goverment via the National Institute of Health provides the capital to host the articles but all the articles on that site are from peer reviewed scientific journals. Its about as unbiased as you can get from humans. It is certainly better than a .com or a .org.

    "My point was the OP can google her question and get all sorts of information, that is just as reliable or not as anything she is going to get here"

    I totally agree. I just have a pet peeve against what I see as fear-mongering based on online articles about the "dangers" of foods that when you dig into them you can see they just boil down to some persons opinion and aren't based on any sort of unbiased study. I think it adds a lot of unneccesary stress to what should be an enjoyable experience of looking after yourself. I don't meant to be rude and I apologize if anything I said came across as such.

    Also don't get me wrong I certainly wouldn't contramand your doctor's advice but in my opinion doctors are just individual people and they tend to be swayed by mear hints in the literature that something might have ill effects before any solid study is actually performed. I mean I don't disagree, by all means error on the side of caution. In otherwords in your place I'd probably do what my doctor said to do because I may as well but I wouldn't really believe that either until I saw some evidence. A quick glance at the literature shows that in rodents fed soy as their ONLY source of protein that there was a significant but small decrease in T4 thyroid levels but I see nothing based on a diet supplmeneted or including soy in addition to other sources of protein nor any epidemiological studies performed in humans.

    Of course, I'm just a person with opinions as well :-).

    I understand were you are coming from on this. I wasn't really even giving my opinion, just giving other sources to look at.

    I really don't get testing things on rodents and expecting them to have the same effect on a human. It is just like dogs, to much chocolate or grapes would easily kill a small dog, but not a human.
  • akork
    akork Posts: 31
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    <shrug> They test on rodents because they can't test directly on humans for ethical and cost reasons, the best you can hope for really is an epidemiology study which relies on statistics and large sample sizes to look for coorelations between behaviors of large populations of humans and health-risk factors. That said I'd say 90%+ of the food scares you see on the web can be traced back to a single study done once in mice or rats where they fed them ONLY on that food and saw some slight change. The article itself when you read it doesn't try to oversell their findings but the .coms and .orgs tend to sensationalize it to get more hits or attention. All I was getting at with the soymilk rant was that this study hasn't been done so when people state that "soy milk is bad for you" like its a fact...it isn't, its an opinion.

    What I "believe" is that its important to get all three of the major nutrients (carbs, fat, protein)...that there probably is good to get the appropriate balance of them but this balance varies a lot depending on the person and their activity level and that although websites like MFP can provide a ballpark I would not take the eat exactly 65g of protein as some gold-standard of truth. When it boils down to it all weight loss or gain is is a net negative or positive calories and it doesnt matter if those calories come from a snickers bar or an apple, fat, carbs or protein. Can you get fat off soy milk...yes. Will you get cancer from soy milk...no reason to think that is true.
  • Sugs94
    Sugs94 Posts: 375 Member
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    I drink it....but try and limit how much. Still not convinced that it doesn't have an effect due to the estrogens. My niece used to like it much better than regular milk and my sister saw no problem in her drinking it as did any of us. But she started to show signs of rapid maturing at age 7.,,which can happen, but as she developed breasts, and pubic hair etc, her MD sent her to an endocrinologist who ran all sorts of tests and nothing was off in pituitary etc. They were concerned she would have early puberty peak which can actually stunt growth and were going to do more tests when the endocrinologist did a food survey and saw that she was drinking a ton of soy milk. Told my sister to stop it immediately and the rapid growth spurt came to a screaming halt and she went at a much more even level. She is now 12 and maturing normally. So maybe...maybe not...I just use it in moderation

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