The Blog

2021-

2021-06-01 f
WATCH OUT FOR SOY BOYS

Long-term Soy Consumption Makes Monkeys Aggressive Loners: Shocking Study with Possible Human Implications, 2021

If long-term consumption of soy isoflavones can make monkeys into aggressive loners, as a 2004 scientific study suggests, what about humans? Soybean oil is the most widely consumed oil in the United States and is a ubiquitous part of processed foods.

A few days ago we reported on a shocking recent study which showed that soybean oil caused serious genetic dysfunction in mice, leading to weight gain and serious neurological problems. These results should be cause for alarm for one simple reason: soybean oil is the most widely consumed oil in the United States. Indeed, there has been a 100-fold increase in soybean oil consumption during the 20^th century. Soybean oil is everywhere, especially in the processed foods which make up a significant portion, even a majority, of the diets of most people in America and much of the rest of the developed world (see for instance this study from Brazil).

It is becoming increasingly clear that vegetable oils in general, including soybean oil, are seriously bad not just for mice but people too. Recently we dubbed vegetable oil ‘one of the worst things you can eat’, and also included vegetable-oil-laden processed food as one of the main foods that make you ugly. Processed food has been under intense scrutiny, as a result of a new documentary that aired on the BBC last week. For a period of a month, a British doctor conducted a self-experiment by eating a diet composed of 80% processed food, a diet consumed by as much as two-thirds of the adult population in the UK.

The fruits of the doctor’s televised experiment included serious weight gain, piles (hemorrhoids), anxiety, sleeplessness, loss of libido and, most shockingly of all, changes to the structure of his brain considered to be typical of drug addicts. Weeks after the experiment ended, scans revealed that the neurological changes had not been reversed. The doctor is now quite literally hard-wired to want to eat processed food.

In light of this focus on not just the physical but the mental and emotional effects of consuming vegetable-oil laden processed food, one aspect of the soybean oil study that has generated discussion in recent weeks is the finding that soybean oil consumption caused dysregulation of the mice’s oxytocin system. Only some of the implications of this were discussed in the study, leaving readers to enlarge upon them. As well as being involved in the regulation of weight gain, oxytocin also has an important role to play in the expression of empathy and social bonding. (read more)

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