Soya and derivatives

[suze]

In Foods To Fight Cancer Prof Beliveau and Dr Gingas have 11 chapters on foods they call nutraceuticals: foods which are specifically good at targetting cancer.

I'm going to do a little thread on each one which sums up the value of the particular food or food group and then where we can add our own comments or recipes etc for each one.

[suze]

Soya beans and derivatives

Beans – endame beans – fresh in their pods
Miso – fermented paste of soya used for soups in Japan
Soy sauce – most well known soya product, made from fermented beans
Tamari – a type of soy sauce made exclusively from beans
Dry roasted soya beans
Tofu – thick pulverised beans
Soya milk – liquid made from pulverised beans. Be wary of what else is added to pseudo-diary products called soya-milk / drink / yogurt / icecream etc, often heavy with sugar, tho.

Summary page 97
1. The high consumption of soya based foods in Asia may be the reason that the East has far lower rates of hormone-depdt cancers than in the West.

2. Isoflavones, the anti-cancer compounds present in soya, possess a chemical structure similar to sex-hormones so they can interfere with cancers caused by high-levels of these hormones in the bloodstream.

3. Eat soya rather that isoflavone supplements, ideally 50g of soya per day.
The reason not to use supplements is cos these pills have been associated with an aggravation of certain breast cancers.

[suze]

Soy has been one of the plants most associated with genetic modification. It's not at all certain what impact this might have on us, so I'm going to look our for non GM, and organic when buying soy products.

Soy is good cos it is a source of complete protiens that easily replace the role of meat in any diet.

It's also rather bland, but works well with the curry / ginger / garlic medley that we're also supposed to eat, so I guess that could be seen as a good thing!

[suze]

Finally got around to using the soya mince that I bought a while ago. It was nicer than I expected and took the flavours of a chilli con carne type thing really well. It was a treat to eat something that tasted quite like a beef-dinner after years of not eating minced beef at all!

Combined with tomotoes, chilli, garlic and onions it was a great anti-cancer recipe. I used marmite and soy sauce and sesame oil to give it teh beefed-up effect.

[Mark]

We tried the mince ages ago, all thought it was OK, but strangely we never tried it again!

[suze]

It is cheap, that's one thing! Also, you never get any unexpected bits in soya mince, where you still can get bits of gristle in the real thing! I probably wont get into the habit of using it, cos we are in the habit of eating a different way .. but I will certainly use the rest of the bag as some point!

[suze]

making soya yogurt

I have bought one of these big flasks to make my own yogurt cos I cannot get organinc soya yog but I can get organic soya milk, and also the main commercially available yg (Alpro) has sugar in it!