Newsflash: Food Is Good For You

I have been itching to construct this post for months now, but I did not quite have all my ducks in a row and was not sure I could convey my point in a manner that would make the impact it is worthy of. Until today, that is. Dad found the information I knew was out there and could not find, and I am ready to go. What I am going to attempt to do is bring into light what happens when non-agricultural people begin to influence food trends.

It is safe to say that soybeans have become a major celebrity in the food world. We associate soy products with a modern, healthy, trendy, stay-away-from-that-bad-meat-milk-and-eggs sort of diet that is widely adopted by health conscious people. Everyone seems to want a piece of the nifty soybean marketing pie; one does not have to try very hard to find soy milk, soy cheese, soy meat substitutes, soy egg substitutes, the list goes on and on. These bean-based foods are marketed as better for everyone because they do not have any of that scary cholesterol or those terrifying preservatives and hormones that farmers wildly pack into their meat products. In other words, soybeans are accepted as a wonderfood that can solve all the dietary problems of today.

Or can they?

Remember my post about the hormone levels in untreated and hormone-treated beef? I mentioned that the meat hormone scare is fairly irrelevant because hormone concentrations in a serving of non-treated and treated beef differs by only several billionths of a gram. This is what I was referring to: a serving of meat from an untreated steer contains 1.1 nanograms of estrogen (one nanogram is a billionth of a gram; estrogen is what the animals are implanted with and is the hormone everyone is afraid of ingesting). On the flip side, a serving of beef from a steer on a rigorous hormone treatment schedule contains 1.4 nanograms of estrogen. Neither concentration is large enough to even be considered a threat by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA - the people dedicated to making sure your food is safe), and the difference between the two is small to the point of irrelevance. Estrogen levels in a serving of milk are slightly higher at 13.6 nanograms, still a level that does not cause a stir. Despite these manageable (even healthy, if you will) hormone levels, meat and milk have gotten a black eye when it comes to the health conversation.

Now consider this: our cure-all soybeans also produce and contain estrogen. Quite a lot of it, actually. In fact, a serving of soybean oil contains 189,133 nanograms of the hormone. Yes, you read that correctly: a serving of soy oil (that is touted as healthy and harmless) contains 189,133 times MORE estrogen than a serving of beef from a rigorously-enhanced steer (that is ridiculed as unhealthy and dangerous). So when someone drinks a glass of soy milk because they heard from Oprah that real milk is unhealthy, they are introducing significantly higher levels of life-changing estrogen into their system than if they had enjoyed the real thing. That tofu burger selected by the college student who went vegetarian because she "found out from PETA that cattle are abused, hormone-raging science projects" is pouring thousands of times more estrogen into her body than if she had eaten a real beef patty. Worst of all, the trendy mother who gives her young boy soy milk every day for breakfast is blasting the little guy with estrogen - over a period of time, he is going to develop some very feminine features. Ironic, isn't it? The people pushing away from farmers in an attempt to become more healthy are actually walking right in to the problems they think are being avoided, and they have no idea it is happening.

It is interesting to me that people are more willing to listen to "food experts" who have never even set foot on a farm (where ALL of our food comes from!) than a farmer or agricultural expert who grew up producing the real thing. I read somewhere that we have gotten to the point of viewing what is on our plate as calories, cholesterol, vitamins, and all of the other health terms we can't get away from rather than vegetables, meats, and grains. This is devastating because food is so GOOD - it has awesome colors, textures, flavors, smells...eat a little of everything in moderation and forget all the scientific garbage. Look at what you are eating - if there is a nice variety of stuff and you can identify all of it as something that was grown, not processed, EAT IT! It is time we once again view and trust our farmers as the food experts, otherwise we will end up choking down "Jimmy's super low calorie ultra fat burning totally vitamin packed omega-3 enhanced eco-friendly awesome SOY protein bar!!!" Blah.