The State of the Union message is coming up on January 31. What would you feel if President Bush promised to do everything in his power to end the oil economy and usher in an age of alternative energy?
I had the same feeling yesterday when I read that the American Heart Association’s Nutrition Committee decided that soy does not confer the health benefits claimed for it. The Committee reviewed a wide range of clinical trials to find out whether anything had changed since 1999 when the FDA allowed food manufacturers to advertise cholesterol-lowering benefits for soy-containing foods.
The Committee found that the evidence is not there to support claims that soy improves LDL cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, lipoprotein(a), triglycerides, or blood pressure. My feeling was “so what?” As far as I’m concerned, cholesterol-lowering is a dead end (so to speak) for preventing heart attacks, which is what the Heart Association is all about. They’re just stuck in outdated science.
But the Nutrition Committee went on to evaluate the effect of soy on hot flashes and bone loss in menopausal women along with the effect on breast, uterine, and prostate cancer. The evidence didn’t support a benefit for soy with any of these conditions either.
The news coverage of this official position by the Heart Association suggested that the FDA would soon disallow cholesterol-lowering claims for foods that contain soy. The men in Armani suits and tasseled shoes who lobby for the soy industry will no doubt get busy soon. The Nutrition Committee threw them something of a bone by concluding that although soy couldn’t claim cholesterol benefits, it could claim to be “heart healthy” because it’s low in saturated fat. Yet another heart attack myth the Heart Association clings to.
In the end, like George Bush promising alternative energy, this news from the Heart Association promoted a good idea for what I have no doubt are the wrong reasons. What concerns me even more is how such a commitment actually affects my life and yours in practice.
But several interesting items were buried in the Committee’s report. One concerned hot flashes. In discussing the effect (or lack of one) of soy on hot flashes, the Committee noted that the clinical trials showed what they called a substantial reduction in hot flashes among women taking placebos. But placebos are supposed to have no effect. What’s going on there? And why isn’t the Committee calling for research into that instead of ever more intricate variations on soy?
It reminds me that the clinical trial as the so-called gold standard for research is both a virtue and a severe limitation of conventional science. This is experimentation where you twiddle one thing and see what happens. But of course you have to twiddle the right thing. And you have to be looking in the right place for the result. The Heart Association’s report won’t be much help to you in figuring out whether soy is good for you. For that, you’ll have to go to a resource like Kaayla Daniel’s The Whole Soy Story and Layna’s interview of her on this show.
Related resources are available on the Food and Nutrition page.
