The Four-eyed Journal » Diet

Health benefits of soy milk and the dilemma of gaining weight

jhay — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 00:52:58 +0000

“OMG! Have you become a vegetarian?” exclaimed a friend of mine when he saw me gulp down a whole glass of soy milk. He concluded is was soy milk for on the table was a plastic bottle half-filled with the white stuff that most would shriek from.

After my finishing my glass of soy milk, chilled and lightly sweetened, I faced him with a smile and answered, “Hell no! Why would I give up enjoying pork chops and beef steaks. Hotdogs and hamburgers. Those things might be filled with nasty substances, additives and industrial-strength preservatives, give you a killer heart condition, but hell, I’d never give them up for a completely green, geeky ~~and gay~~ vegetarian diet.” (Okay, here’s a more serious link about vegetarian.

His stunned silence were broken by these words; “Oh. Right. But you’re a geek, a skinny-ass geek if I may add. So it would make sense that you convert into a vegetarian diet if you really want to seriously gain weight.”

What a (~~Jerk!~~) good friend he is right? They are the group of people who would never waste a second to tell you what they honestly think about you. Unlike your parents who insist that you’re the most beautiful creature in the planet that’s why no one in school should pick on you for being ugly. But that’s another story. I love you mom!

Moving along, my friend is right. Heck, everyone who knows me or have seen my photo would agree that I am a skinny-ass blogger and I should do something about it. Then again would going on a vegetarian diet really help me gain weight? Hmm?

Reviewing my biology lessons, we gain weight by converting excess calories into either body fat or muscle mass. So the basic formula (nutrionists, dieticians, doctors and other smart-asses do correct me on this) would be: your average daily calorie intake, which is the amount of food you eat every day and its equivalent in calories + 300-500 more calories.

The added 300-500 calories would be an excess, and if your body doesn’t consume it, it will be saved up for rainy days and stored as body fat or muscle mass. Usually it’s the former but for yours truly, a little of either or both would do just fine.

So which diet would give me those extra calories? I say both! You may argue for and against which diet, vegetarian or meat-based, is best all you want but I’d be diplomatic and enjoy both worlds. Red meat, fish, eggs, a few greens here and there especially if it’s kare-kare, fruit juices (tropicana ~~+ gin~~) and what used to be cow’s milk, now is soy milk. Just for a change, a healthy change.

And now for the sake of this post’s title and pleasing the new lord of the internets, here are some goodie bits about soy milk.

Soybeans contain all three of the macro-nutrients required for good nutrition: complete protein, carbohydrate and fat, as well as vitamins and minerals, including calcium, folic acid and iron.

Soybeans are the only common plant food that contain complete protein. Soybean protein provides all the essential amino acids in the amounts needed for human health. The amino acid profile of soy protein is nearly equivalent in quality to meat, milk and egg protein.

Soymilk is an excellent source of protein, B-vitamins and iron, and if fortified, provides adequate calcium. It has low levels of saturated fat and no cholesterol.

(I ~~stole it~~, sourced it from here.)

And here’s more from nutritionist Patricia Greenberg, B.A.

Like milk, soy is a great source of protein and can easily be found with added calcium. But drinking soymilk has the following advantages:

Soymilk is cholesterol free.

It contains cancer-fighting isoflavones.

It is readily available from organic sources (containing no pesticides).

Soybeans grow abundantly and actually replenish the soil they grow in.

Cow’s milk (unless you always buy organic) contains pesticides from the feed as well as antibiotics. Those additional substances, not naturally found in milk, are added by the dairy farmers and can be harmful to humans, even in small quantities. The use of cow’s milk also has ecological disadvantages. The amount of soy that could be grown on acreage used by grazing cattle could feed more people than the cows do.

Jhay’s friend: Oh, cool. But you’re still way too busy with school, your extra-curriculars, your social involvements, your Call of Duty tours and drinking bouts and stuff. Can’t you see that the “extra” calories you added to your diet are being consumed as well?

Me: Uhm…yeah. So?

Jhay’s friend: Don’t you think you should really eat more, sleep and rest more while adding more healthy foods to your diet?

Me: I know okay?! I know!

Humans were meant to be vegetarians?

jhay — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:08:42 +0000

I’ve been seeing lots of anti-GMO videos in YouTube lately and though I sympathize with the majority of their views I noticed one common argument that underscores an interesting notion to consider about human evolution and our supposedly ‘natural diet’.

My carelessness has caused me to lose the link to the video but I distinctly remember that in that one particular video against corporate domination of the agro-industry in the United States and how they use and promote the cultivation and consumption of GMOs for profit; they advance their own advocacy; converting all of us into animal-loving vegetarians.

Sure they begin with the ethics of slaughtering livestock, how dirty meat processing plants are, how much random thing could end up in your hamburger but one of their most potent arguments in persuading us to stop eating red meat and stick to all vegetable-diet is the evolutionary biology, in particular the evolutionary history of our anatomy.

All over our the design of our anatomy, evolution tells us that we humans are natural vegetable eaters.

Teeth – if you look at the human teeth, it is primarily designed for grinding and crushing food stuffs. No sharp, serrated teeth or fangs found in the mouths of carnivores such as lions, tigers, sharks etc. There’s even plenty of flat surfaces for grinding, crushing and mashing plant matter. Much like the teeth of cow, elephants and other grazing animals.

No claws – even if we grow long fingernails, those would easily break off in the face of hard or tough objects, let alone be used for pinning down live prey like those of the claws of the big cats and the talons of the birds of prey.

Stomach chemistry – the chemical composition of the digestive juices found in our stomachs are very much similar to those of the non-meat eating animals. Simply put, it’s more chemically suited in digesting plant matter instead of those good red meat.

Intestines 5x longer than our body length – You’ve probably seen this thousands of times before in gory horror films where in the bowels of the victims are dismembered from their guts. One classic example is Inspector Pazzi who was gutted by Dr. Hannibal Lecter in the thriller film “Hannibal.” Anyways, our intestines being 5 times longer than our own body length is suited for further digestion of plant matter since doing so requires much longer time because of the indigestible substance in plants such as cellulose and other tough fibers.

These strings of evidence supporting the vegetarian nature of the human diet is further back up by the fact that most of our modern-day cousins in the evolutionary tree – the great apes – are vegetarians.

However, things get a bit shaky from here. One of the unique traits of us humans is that we evolved to survive on a wide variety of diets. We could survive both on meat and plant matter or any other combination of both. That’s why we are termed as “omnivores” (from Latin: omne all, everything; vorare to devour) which is a species of animal that eats both plants and animals as its primary food source.

Sure our anatomy supports the early, nay ancient, vegetarian way of life but evolution takes time, lots of it. Modern humans, Homo sapiens, have just been around the planet for like some ten thousand years and so we’re quite a relatively young specie therefore you’d expect to find ancestral traits to be numerous in our present forms.

We lack claws because we have opposable thumbs with which we could use to manipulate hundreds of objects which have been turned into tools thanks to our exceptional brain capabilities.

We don’t have fangs because again we have our brains and tools to bring down prey for food.

Being vegetarian or meat-eater is no big deal for me. You’ll only have troubles with me if you enforce your vegetarian ways upon me.