When it comes to soy, don't blame the bean; blame the processing

(NaturalNews) One of the strangest behaviors I've ever seen in the natural health crowd is something I call "Soy Rage." It's an angry reaction that wells up in some people every time they hear me recommend natural, non-GMO, home-made soy milk.

People get angry about it. Downright nasty at times. They insist all soy is bad for you and there's no such thing as "healthy soy." To that, I say stop blaming the plant.

Blame the processing. (And the slash-and-burn farming...)

Processed soy is atrociously bad for you

Based on everything I've learned over the last decades or soy, I believe that processed soy products are atrociously bad for you. I wouldn't touch a carton of Silk with a ten-foot straw. Processed tofu is a nutritious joke, and when it comes to soy protein, I've already published numerous articles exposing the toxins found in conventional processed soy protein.

Processed soy, like lots of processed things, is quite bad for your health.

But natural soy, grown organically (and locally, where possible), can actually be quite good for you. Natural soy milk, made right at home, has been part of the healthy traditional Chinese diet for thousands of years. Some of its plant-based nutrients have very powerful anti-cancer elements that can help prevent both prostate and breast cancers. Natural, non-GMO soy has some very positive properties and can play an important role in a healthy disease-preventing diet.

But the Soy Rage people don't see it that way. To them, all soy is bad for you, end of discussion.

It's an ignorant belief. It's like saying "all sugar is bad for you."

Well, not really. When I take a machete and cut some living sugar cane stalks here in Ecuador, and I take them to a sugar cane juicing machine and squeeze out all the green juice, with all its minerals and phytonutrients, and then I enjoy that amazing beverage, it's very good for me! Drinking raw sugar cane juice is a lot like drinking wheat grass juice (sugar cane is actually a grass) except it tastes way better.

Sugar is a lot like soy: When it's unprocessed and natural, it's quite good for you. When it's processed and modified, it's bad!

Lots of things are good for you BEFORE they're processed

Many people in the natural health arena need a better understanding of this: There are lots of things that are quite good for you in their unprocessed form. It's the processing that makes them bad for you.

For example:

Processed sugar cane is bad. Raw sugar cane is good.

Processed salt is bad. Unprocessed, full-spectrum sea salt is good.

Processed cow's milk is bad. Fresh, raw cow's milk is good.

Processed chocolate can be a junk food. Raw, natural cacao is a superfood!

Processed wheat is bad for you. Stone-ground whole wheat can be good for you.

Processed soy milk is bad. Natural, home-made soy milk is good.

Processed cheese is bad. Natural, home-made cheese is far less so.

Processed (canned) fruits are bad. Raw, fresh fruits are good for you.

You see, it's not the food itself that's good or bad -- it's the processing! And sadly, virtually all the foods consumed by most consumers today are highly processed.

What happens when you "process" food

So what's the problem with processing food anyway? When you process food, five very bad things happen:

#1 - Minerals are stripped out, such as 98% of the magnesium being stripped out of wheat when it's milled and bleached into white flour.

#2 - Phytonutrients are destroyed. As much as 90% of the phytonutrient content is lost during processing. (And remember, phytonutrients are the disease-fighting medicines found in foods.)

#3 - The physical properties of foods are artificially altered in a way that makes them dangerous. The homogenization of milk, for example, alters the fat molecules in milk, giving them properties that contribute to heart disease and clogged arteries. Partially-hydrogenated oils are also the result of a physical alteration that makes food dangerous for your health.

#4 - Calories are concentrated. When you process corn into High Fructose Corn Syrup, for example, you are concentrating calories in an unnatural way that then promotes diabetes and obesity.

#5 - Nutrient diversity is destroyed. In nature, every orange has a slightly different spectrum of nutrients, but by the time thousands of oranges are processed into orange juice, that natural variation has been lost. Processed food "standardization" is bad for you health because your body needs nutrient variety, not nutrient conformity.

These five alterations turn a once-healthy food into a disease-promoting food. Once again, it's not the food, it's the processing that determines its health status.

So what about soy?

Getting back to the soy question, if you drink soy milk as it has been traditionally made in Asia for thousands of years, it's good for you in moderation. If you drink processed, pasteurized, standardized garbage soy milk beverages made from pesticide-ridden soybeans (or GM soy), then you're just being duped.

Real soy milk, by the way, only lasts a couple of days in the refrigerator. It goes bad very quickly because it's real food. But processed soy milk lasts a long, long, long time without going sour. That makes me suspicious: Why won't bacteria eat this stuff?

And one of the best bits of food advice I can give you is simple this: If bacteria won't eat it, you probably shouldn't either.

Anything that has a long shelf life, in other words, is probably laced with toxic chemicals or completely devoid of nutrients. So don't eat it or drink it. That goes for margarine, processed cheese "food" (a hilarious misnomer if I've ever heard one) and processed soy milk.

The GOOD soy milk

One brand of soy milk I do trust is Eden Soy. (www.EdenFoods.com) Their soy products have been through all kinds of scrutiny and passed with flying colors. They even received high scores from the Cornucopia Institute's Behind the Bean report: http://www.cornucopia.org/2009/05/s...

Here's the soy scorecard you'll want to see: http://www.cornucopia.org/soysurvey/

Notice which brands have all the crap ratings? They're the most popular brands: Gardenburger (yuck!), Silk (are you kidding me?), Westsoy (ugh), Boca Burgers (choke!), and O Organics (do they think we're stupid?).

The best brands were Eden Soy, Vermont Soy, Unisoya and many others that you can see for yourself on the scorecard.

So please help me get the word out to those who suffer from Soy Rage -- it's not the plant, it's the processing! Soy can be really good, or soy can be really bad. It all depends on how you grow it and process it.

It's really the same story with almost every food. Corn can be wholesome and healthy, or it can be made into liquid junk foods (HFCS). Same story with sugar, too. In fact, it's pretty darned ignorant to run around making blanket statements like, "All ___ is bad" (fill in the blank with whatever natural plant you wish).

I trust and believe that NaturalNews readers are the discerning type of people who recognize that the processing makes all the difference.

Don't believe food company health claims

Of course, processed food companies exploit the confusion to try to position their highly processed junk foods as healthy foods. They proclaim, "Made with soy!" Or "Made with omega-3s!" Yeah, but they're probably all oxidized and nutritionally worthless by the time you open the box that's been on the shelf for four months.

My advice? Stop believing anything the food companies say and simply think for yourself. If it's processed, packaged and made with a long list of un-pronouncable ingredients, it's almost certainly really, really bad for you. Avoid anything that's pasteurized, homogenized, hydrogenated or autolyzed and you'll live a whole lot longer.

And don't be afraid of good soy products. They can actually be quite healthy for you when consumed in moderation. I don't recommend drinking soy all day long every day, of course. There's a sensible limit on everything. But drinking some organic, trusted soy milk as part of your breakfast is perfectly healthy. In fact, it has some health benefits that are very clearly noted in the scientific literature.

Soy farming

The real downside to soy isn't the plant itself, but rather the slash-and-burn farming practices surrounding soy. In order to grow soy, farmers in Brazil and other South American countries are destroying the Amazon rainforest.

Here's a good article by Lester Brown that summarizes the scope of the destruction: http://www.grist.org/article/growin...

Some of this blame, of course, rests with U.S. soy product companies that have stopped buying soybeans from American farmers and resorted to cheaper, imported soybeans grown in areas that used to be pristine rainforest. That's why the Behind the Bean report mentioned above is so valuable: It helps clue us in on the origins of the soybeans used in various soy products.

The biggest consumer of soy, however, is indirectly the meat industry. That's because most of the soy grown in the world ends up used in animal feed. So the single biggest step that consumers can take right now to save the Amazon rainforest is to stop eating meat that's raised on soybeans. That alone would curb soy production and put a halt to the destruction of the Amazon.

For those who choose to eat soy, it's important to know where your soy comes from. If possible, buy soy products made from soybeans grown within your own country. The products may be more expensive than ones made from cheap slash-and-burn agricultural practices in the Amazon, but they make a lot more economic sense when you consider the bigger picture.

The Amazon rainforest, of course, offers huge economic benefits when it is left intact and living. But those economic benefits don't appear on any accounting tables or GDP figures, so they are largely ignored. But the simple truth is that we're all better off with the Amazon rainforest alive than dead.

Want to save the Amazon? Eat less meat (raised on soybeans). And when you consume soy products, don't buy products made from soy grown in what used to be the Amazon rainforest.

Pharmaceuticals are more dangerous to your health than terrorists' exploding underwear (satire)

(NaturalNews) As all of North America now seems to be focused on the issue of one terrorist wearing a pair of exploding underwear, I might as well comment on this latest bit of security theater that seems to have transfixed the nation. Pictures of the exploding underwear "bomb" have now surfaced on the 'net. You can view them at ABC News: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/north...

Here is exactly what the text on this page says (I'm not making this up, this is seriously true): (warning: Some of the content here is graphic, read at your own risk...)

"The first photo, to the left, shows the slightly charred and singed underpants with the bomb packet still in place."

I don't know what you think, but if you did an underwear search of all the passengers flying these days, you'd probably find half of them are wearing underwear that's slightly charred and singed with the "bomb packet" still in place.

The gastrointestinal health of the general population is atrocious! And by the time you add in some airport food and in-flight processed food snacks, pretty much everyone on the airplane is setting off a little bomb packet by the time they get off the plane. (Why do you think everybody can't wait to get off in such a hurry?)

Processed food has turned us all into in-flight terrorists!

Frankly, I'm not sure what's more of a threat to public health: Lousy airport security or the digestive effects of in-flight meals. But they both have one thing in common: Underwear...

How to explode your rectum without harming anyone nearby

The ABC News story mentioned above goes on to state that this terrorist's underwear was packing 80 grams of an explosive powder called PETN, which government tests have revealed can blow a (tiny) hole in the wall of an airplane.

This is all brilliant stuff, of course. Truly brilliant. This whole idea that underwear explosives might destroy an airplane all makes sense except for the fact that the terrorist's butt cheeks are in the way!

Had this explosive packet actually been set off, I can tell you exactly what would have happened: There would have been a really loud pop, immediately followed by in-flight pieces of exploding butt cheeks.

I'm not trying to be funny here. This is a true description of the way bombs work. They explode outward, destroying whatever is closest to them first. And this guy actually had this bomb wedged in between his butt cheeks. A sort of "wedgie bomb", if you will. A wedgie with a bang.

This is a serious discussion. There was an attempted assassination of a Middle Eastern prince that happened not long ago. It was even reported in the press. The assassin had somehow managed to shove explosives into his rectum -- I swear I'm not making this up -- and waltzed right through security with it. He then shuffled toward his target, fired off the bomb and subsequently blew his butt cheeks all over the room... without harming anyone else.

Brilliant, huh?

Think about it. In World War II films, you know how you always see brave soldiers throwing themselves on an enemy grenade to protect their squad buddies? That actually works because whoever is on top of the grenade absorbs the explosion. It's basic physics.

In the case of super wedgie terrorist, he's sitting right on top of the explosive powder! Who do you think is going to absorb the full force of the explosion? It's going to be the guy sitting on it.

This is physics 101. A small bomb in somebody's underwear is really only a threat to the idiot wearing the underwear.

The first rule of making bombs is that you probably should not be sitting on top of them when they go off.

Please remove your shoes and your underwear...

Predictably, U.S. authorities have now talked this up into a huge security threat. And sooner or later, it's all bound to lead up to mandatory underwear searches!

I can see it now: A row of air passengers stands nervously at the gate, nearly ready to board the plane when TSA enforcers approach and suddenly demand that everybody bend over and pull down their underwear for a quick search for "explosives."

Sadly, most Americans are so brain-numbed by security propaganda, they would probably go along with it!

So why not just go all the way with this and pass a new TSA rule requiring all Americans to fly with no underwear!

The captain comes on the intercom, saying, "Visibility is 80 miles, we're climbing to 29,000 feet, and we're expecting this flight to be a little breezy..."

Yep, it's undies off when boarding planes from now on. As you pass through security, you can toss your water bottles in one bin, your underwear and panties in another bin, and your self respect in a third. Essentially, if these security searches get any more personal, they're going to undress us from head to toe and make us wear medical gowns, chained to our seats like convicts in a prisoner transport plane. Once we land, we can reclaim our underwear and, if we're lucky, a bit of our lost pride.

Your bra just might contain a bomb...

Don't you just love how air travel authorities keep coming up with new stuff that you have to throw away because it might be a bomb? Remember when we could bring actual water on airplanes? Those were the good old days.

Then one day they declare "Your water might be a bomb!" So millions of passengers now ditch their water at the security gate, throwing it all to waste.

Then they came up with the idea that terrorists could "mix binary liquids" to make liquid bombs in the airplane toilet, and they used that to ban all liquids. So much for your toothpaste, contact lens solution, herbal tinctures and superfood beverage. Toss it in the trash if you want to get on this plane, buddy!

Now they're going after your underwear. And it won't be long before you have to strip down to your birthday suit and hand over your undies for an "inspection" -- right before they send you through the low-frequency X-ray machine that scans your body parts and displays them on a screen as if you were butt naked.

Just wait for a female terrorist who hides some explosives in her bra one day. Following that, a new TSA security rule will be initiated and all flights will become bra-less. No underwear, no bras, no water... what the heck is happening here? Are airlines going to shave our heads and tattoo barcodes on our arms, too, just in case they lose track of which person was handcuffed to which seat?

Absurd security

This is all getting beyond the point of absurdity. If a terrorist wants to pack a little explosive powder and stuff it down their pants, or up their rectum, or have it surgically sewn into their abdomen, there's nothing we can do to stop that short of strip-searching every single passenger.

And that's not security: That's just a demeaning police state that treats its own people like criminals. If we all have to fly without underwear and bras, the terrorists win!

Besides, all this ridiculous security isn't about saving lives. If U.S. authorities wanted to save lives, they would ban aspartame, or outlaw chemotherapy, or arrest the crooks at the drug companies who are killing over a hundred thousand people every single year -- a far greater number than those killed by in-flight acts of terror (even including 2001 and 9/11).

Even if there were no airport security at all, the risk of being killed by an in-flight act of terror would be a fraction of the risk of being killed by pharmaceuticals in any given year. So why are U.S. authorities going crazy about airport security when so many Americans are dying from pharmaceutical toxicity every single day? Statistically speaking, the number of people killed by dangerous prescription medications is equivalent to one jumbo air liner falling out of the sky and crashing to the ground every single day.

Yet that threat to health and safety goes entirely unmentioned. Un-investigated. Un-noticed.

So while over 100,000 Americans are dying each year from dangerous medications, the mainstream media has us all fixated on a pair of exploding underwear? Are you kidding me?

The whole thing has become a complete circus. Real threats to your safety are ignored while miniscule threats are hyped up as if they were life-and-death to everyone.

And yet, amazingly, most air travelers still go along with it!

This just goes to show you how easily the population can be controlled by fear. I never thought that a photo of a pair of singed underwear would scare a hundred million adults into giving up their freedoms, but this is what has apparently taken place.

How about zero-security flights?

Here's an idea: Airlines should offer optional zero-security flights. On those flights, there are no security checks. Anyone with a valid concealed-carry permit could bring any weapons they want, and the pilot and co-pilot can be armed, too. You can pass right through security with no X-rays, no checks, no delays. You simply sign a disclaimer and go right from the check-in counter to your boarding gate with zero hassles.

I would gladly fly on these zero-security flights. You know why? Because 99.99% of the people flying on those planes would be cops packing heat, ex-military people packing heat and concealed-carry citizens packing heat. Any terrorist stupid enough to try something on such a flight would find himself facing a citizen's army of vigilant passengers.

Zero-security flights would be the safest airplanes in the sky, because no terrorist, hijacker or violent criminal would dare board one.

Plus, we all get to keep our underwear on.