Sunday, October 9, 2016

The Whole Soy Story – review

Here's a review I wrote a decade ago of a book that became the bible of soy-bashing.

The Whole Story?

Half truths and untruths do not a whole story make


The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America's Favorite Health Food
By Kaayla T. Daniel, PhD, CCN
NewTrends Publishing, Inc., 2005
Hardcover, 440 pages, $41.95 Cdn.
 
REVIEWED by SYD BAUMEL
 
If you've ever wondered how a slick prosecutor would throw the book at a beleaguered health food, this book's for you. But reader beware: there's no defense attorney in the courtroom that is The Whole Soy Story. Unless you're an expert on the voluminous science of soy or have a few months to pore through medical journals fact-checking author cum prosecutor Kaayla Daniel's forty-four pages of references (and the important references she left out), you may find it hard not to be bamboozled by her slick 394-page indictment. But if you do know enough about the science of soy to catch Daniel attempting to pull the wool over your eyes over and over again, you'll write this book off as an outrageously tainted resource that can't be trusted. 
 
It's not entirely surprising, given Daniel's background.
 
Most of the so-called “soy-bashing” you can find on the Internet and in print can be traced to Sally Fallon and Sue Enig, the food activists who run the Weston A. Price Foundation, and lately to their protegee and fellow Weston Price board member, Kaayla Daniel. The Whole Soy Story is edited by Fallon who owns the small book company that publishes it. 
 
According to the Weston A. Price Foundation's website, its mission is “to disseminate the research of nutrition pioneer Dr. Weston Price....Dr. Price's research demonstrated that humans achieve perfect physical form and perfect health generation after generation only when they consume nutrient-dense whole foods and the vital fat-soluble activators found exclusively in animal fats.” (Emphasis mine.)
 
For Weston A. Price Foundation food activists, the 1930s research and speculation of a Cleveland dentist have translated into an aggressive 21st century bias against plant sources of fat and protein. Soy – a major competitor with the butter, lard, pork and other animal fat and protein sources promoted by the Foundation – is squarely in their sights. The Weston Price gang is so determined to throw everything they can at soy and hope it sticks that they spin and distort the evidence to the point of making their critiques useless for consumers who hunger for a fair reckoning, for the real whole story. Like Fallon and Enig's articles, Daniel's book teems with one-sided errors, exaggerations and half-truths. I will give a few examples here. For more debunking of the Weston Price Foundation's assault on soy, see foodrevolution.org/what_about_soy.htm by John Robbins and the wave of outraged letters to the editor provoked by an abridgement of Daniel's book that appeared in Mothering Magazine in 2004 (mothering.com/sections/extras/soy-letters.html).