Is Tofu Terrific or Terrible?

I like tofu, and I often choose it in place of meat or featured in dishes like mapo tofu.  I have always thought of it as healthy meat substitute.  I then came across this article titled “Health food or Dietary Danger?”  It says that tofu is not that good for you and mentions some studies linking it to dementia in older adults. It even mentions the claim that it makes straight boys gay.  I wondered if any of this could be true.  Is tofu truly bad for you?

The author makes the point that tofu isn’t inherently good for you – it’s just that it substitutes for things that are even worse for you. Replacing meat consumption with tofu helps lower cholesterol because tofu has iron and protein that vegetarian diets might otherwise lack at much lower calorie and fat level. While traditional tofu eating cultures have been shown to have low rates of heart disease, these cultures eat whole soy foods like miso, natto, and tofu. They don’t eat strange and highly processed versions of tofu like TVP, soy hot dogs, and soy milk dairy substitutes. I like this quote from Kayla Daniels, author of the book “The Whole Soy Story:  The Dark Side of America’s Favorite Health Food“:

Although the latest refining techniques yield blander, purer soy proteins than the ‘beany’, hard-to-disguise flavours of the past, the main reason the new soy foods taste and look better is the lavish use of sugar and other sweeteners, salt, artificial flavorings, colors and MSG.

The author of the article states no one has strong evidence that tofu has adverse effects, although one of our 8asians authors claims that in the form of natto, tofu is truly evil.

So tofu is okay when we eat it in a traditional Asian style and not in some highly engineered food product. That’s good news. I would hate to give up mapo tofu!  The author mentions that other protein substitutes are available, like portabello mushrooms and nuts.  She also recommends that if you are going to eat tofu, try to get organic.

(photo credit:  Calvin Marquess, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)