Friday, October 22, 2010

So thats who the Wizard of Oz is....

We havent posted anything in a while (mostly being busy and running out of room where we keep our online photos - Picasa). I did want to share something I recently found out.

I was in Whole Foods about 4 months ago and was fixing my coffee, I was putting in my soy creamer and overheard these women saying "They should not have soy creamer, its bad for you". Another time I was getting a smoothie for Zoe, it was an Almond Butter, banana and soy milk smoothie. The guy who made it gave it to Zoe, smiled and went to work behind the counter. One of the women he worked with went over and chastised him for giving soy milk to a girl, or any woman for that fact, that it messes with their hormones. I have heard many slanders against soy milk, and always had it in the back of my head that these attacks must be coming from an organization, because some of them seemed downright silly, like this one claiming if your kid drinks soy milk it will turn them gay.

Well, I did a little googling and found the biggest culprit of the misinformation. They are the Weston A. Price Foundation. They promote the consumption of dairy and meat (funded by donations from dairy and meat farms). You can read more about them here:

I finally can put a name to the source of the misinformation, for some reason that make me feel a bit better. It makes sense though, if something like soymilk comes along and cuts into your profits, what do you do...scare people into not buying it.

As a side note, one of the big slanders they spread is that by drinking soy you are flooding your body with the female hormone estrogen. Estrogens in soy, phytoestrogens ("phyto" meaning "plant"), have been found to keep our (animal) estrogen levels under control. So if you decide to avoid estrogens by not drinking soy and going with milk, then consider that "Among the routes of human exposure to estrogens, we are mostly concerned about cow's milk, which contains considerable amounts of female sex hormones. Dairy accounts for 60 percent to 80 percent of estrogens consumed. Part of the problem seems to be milk from modern dairy farms, where cows are milked about 300 days a year. For much of that time, the cows are pregnant. The later in pregnancy a cow is, the more hormones appear in her milk.

This quote was taken from an article from Harvard University. So you cant avoid estrogen from drinking cows milk instead of soy, one thing that the Weston A. Price Foundation forgot to mention in their numerous articles denouncing soy milk.

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