Monthly Archives: May 2009

This ad for Soyjoy is in stark contrast with their previous ad campaign, which looked like it was designed by a 5-year-old. This is a beautiful ad, full of copy that wistfully extols the ancient virtues of the mighty soybean.

In fact, if you didn’t break out the magnifying glass to see the product shot, you might think this was an ad for soybeans. The word Soyjoy appears in the copy once; it’s the last word in the last sentence of the last paragraph.

I’ve already mentioned that I tried this product and I thought it was awful. Let’s put that aside and focus on the question of whether soybeans are really as good for us as the natural foods industry would have us believe.

The most important reason to avoid soy in your diet is because soy contains a compound called phytoestrogens. Once in the body, phytoestrogens mimic the effects of estrogen. In fact:

In 1992, the Swiss health service estimated that 100 grams of soy protein provided the estrogenic equivalent of the Pill.

Source: Dr. Joseph Mercola

If you’re a woman, you probably don’t want phytoestrogens in your body. If you’re a man, you certainly don’t want phytoestrogens in your body.

Another possible problem with soy is that it depresses thyroid function. It’s beyond the scope of this blog post to list all the negative aspects of eating soybeans and soy-based products. If you’d like to read the criticism of soy by Dr. Mercola you can read the full article on his website. If you can ignore the seemingly incendiary of the title, you may want to read the series of articles by Jim Rutz. Here’s one more article from Mothering magazine.

Soy is big business and it’s added to practically every food. Check the label of just about every food product and you’ll find soy in the form of soy protein, soy isolate, or soybean oil.

Understand that when Soyjoy claims that “for thousands of years, all around the world, soy has been an integral part of cultures and diets,” you can just as easily say that for thousands of years, all around the world, people thought the Earth was flat and if you sailed out too far, you’d find monsters, then you’d fall off the edge. Ancient Chinese and Indian cosmogeny held that the world was carried on the backs of four elephants, which were in turn carried by a tortoise.

While it’s great to have reverence for ancient cultures, just because a culture is old doesn’t mean that everything they believed is true—just as you can’t believe everything you read in an ad is true.