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Vegan Questions: Wheat and Soy

• May 2013
• Vegan

Hi Steph

I am emailing you from England as have just found your blog and have just done your potato leek soup for supper this evening.

I have been looking online for vegan bloggers as my 18 year old daughter is turning vegan (I am a single mum on a very tight budget so she has agreed to eat up what is in the store cupboard that was bought at her request but I have agreed that replacements will all be vegan).

I have two questions if you have the time. First I see that most of your recipes are wheat free, is this anything to do with veganism or is this for other health reasons? The other thing is that I have heard that tofu can mess with your hormone levels. Obviously as my daughter is still quite young I am anxious about this. She says that she has heard about some Indonesian soya product which is, apparently better. Do you know anything about this as she is a bit vague.

Love your blog. Thanks so much for taking the time to read this.
Libby

Hi Libby,
I’m glad you like my site and recipes! And congratulations to your daughter for caring about her diet and nutrition. One of my favorite sites is nomeatathlete.com, and he offers recipes, nutrition information and answers to questions about just about everything.

A lot of my recipes are wheat free because I make a deliberate effort to avoid processed wheat flour as much as possible. The reason I do this is because it seems like almost everything nowadays is made out of wheat, and I think too much of anything, especially things that aren’t in their whole form, is not healthy. If I make an effort to avoid wheat, and especially white flour as opposed to whole wheat, I think in the end I eat what is probably a reasonable amount. The same philosophy applies to refined sugar, and you’ll notice that most of my recipes say “whatever sweetener you prefer” or list a choice of maple syrup, honey, sugar, etc. I prefer to use maple syrup and fruit for my sweeteners, and I make a strong effort to avoid eating refined sugar. I like Ezekiel bread, as it’s made of sprouted grains, and I like to bake with kamut flour since it’s an older form of wheat which has been less hybridized over the centuries and has more protein.

I believe that eating a simple, whole foods diet full of vegetables, fruit, legumes and whole grains is the secret to good health and nutrition–it’s just unreasonably difficult to eat this way in modern culture unless you change your patterns of shopping and eating and make deliberate choices about how you fuel your body.

I’m also not sure what to believe about soy, because if you do an internet search about soy you will get hundreds of articles telling you how healthy or unhealthy it is. My gut feeling is that this is yet another situation of people taking things way too far–soy is added or processed into food products to a ridiculous level. Fake meat is a big use of soy, which I find really odd. I don’t eat meat and I don’t like meat: the last thing I want to eat is a food that seems like meat. I really like tofu; I don’t need it shaped like a turkey. After having read hundreds of these articles myself and looking for any sort of consensus among them, my personal approach is the same as with everything else: moderation and simple common sense. I make sure that the tofu I buy is organic and non-GMO because everyone seems to agree that soy can be made unhealthy by pesticides and genetic modification. I make my own soymilk from organic soybeans. I use Bragg’s Liquid Aminos in my stir fries. And I really don’t eat much other soy, since I avoid processed foods, and that’s where I think people start consuming excessive amounts of soy, along with everything else. I think the Indonesian form your daughter is referring to is tempeh, and most people seem to agree that tempeh is a very healthy form of soy, due to being fermented and made from the whole beans.

I think that eating a vegan, whole foods diet is also very economical. Most dinners for me are a big salad or soup or brown rice with vegetables and tofu or brown rice pasta with pesto and vegetables. These things are much cheaper than meat, cheese and dairy.
Good luck with your research, and enjoy the food adventures 🙂
Steph