16 Replies to “The Tolerant Left”

  1. Interesting paper and have saved it for reading tonight (too nice a day to be inside). Of course the first thing that one asks is what about Japanese and Chinese populations? It may be that they’ve adapted to the brain rotting effects of tofu. Surprising result, in a way, as tofu contains physoestrogrens and estrogen is involved in adult neurogenesis. This explains the higher level of Alzheimer’s in women post menopausally if they don’t take estrogen supplements. Obviously all estrogenic compounds are not alike. Men have low levels of estrogen (if they have low adiposity) but the levels of male estrogen are high enough to decrease Alzheimers and maintain bone mass.
    It could be that tofu consumption is associated with other, unmeasured, factors. People who eschew meat in favor of tofu are more likely to be B12 deficient and we now know that the level of B12 deficiency has been set far too low as dementia is more likely in individuals with B12 levels less than 400 pM. Low B12 levels also increase homocysteine concentrations and homocysteine is associated with strokes and arterial thrombosis (cholesterol lobby won big in the war on the homocysteine hypothesis).
    It may also be that some soy proteins are involved in autoimmune responses which cause brain damage. Not being a big fan of tofu, I might have it maybe every couple of years so I’m not worried about my brain function. Meat is the ideal food (as long as it’s lean meat and any non-free range meat is consumed with large quantities of supplemental omega-3 fatty acids) and seems to be the preferred diet of those of us who hail originally from Europe.

  3. Is it true that it is not good to feed it to boys who have not reached sexual maturity? Not that it has ever crossed the threshold of my house, I’m just curious.

  6. Is it true that it is not good to feed it to boys who have not reached sexual maturity? Not that it has ever crossed the threshold of my house, I’m just curious.
    I heard the same thing from my father-in-law, who did the research, so I do not let my boys eat tofu and I would not give my boy soy products (soy milk, soy formula) for this reason.

  7. A very good thesis.
    Reading some of the comments over there, personally, I do not believe man is good or bad, any more than a gazelle or leopard is good or bad. We just be what we are, and many philosophies try to distort that, with artificial and self-serving moralities and injunctions. They denigrate man by so doing.
    What appear to be terrible wrongs are instinctively known so to be from a million years of evolution. This is why conservatives are conservative, because they accept this. The violence man is capable of and ready to use has to be contained by social mores at the tribe level. But our capacity to do wrong should not be denied, or we must also deny our capacity to do great and good things, too. (Hey, moral relativism anyone?)
    Lesson over.
    (Not quite sure what I’m trying to say here except God and Devil are two sides of man and we must accept both).

  8. Thanks Loki.. I think I might get laid at the old folks home…Lol… Interesting actually. Kitsilano will be in panic mode tonight.

  9. A truly great post: probably the most concisely informative exposition on the subject I have read. Quite apart from yourself, the boss lady should be proud that her blog attracts persons of your calibre (and we’re not even talking illegal seizures of firearms today).
    I would add only that this story epitomizes Oakeshott’s view about unintended consequences, as expressed in his 1956 essay, “On being Conservative”, to wit:
    “To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss…Changes are without effect only upon those who notice nothing, who are ignorant of what they possess and apathetic to their circumstances; and they can be welcomed indiscriminately only by those who esteem nothing, whose attachments are fleeting and who are strangers to love and affective.”
    (See Michael Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays”, London: Methuen and Co, Ltd., 1962, p. 169-170.)
    As you know, the left cannot understand the concept of unintended consequences: for them, social engineering is just a technocratic “social science” management exercise. Oakeshott, on the other hand, well knew that every change involves the loss of something. Sadly, it’s too much to expect, I suppose, that the left would wake up to the unintended consequences of dietary change, even where it involves the loss of, you know, their minds. But, then again, they probably don’t even esteem their own sanity so much.

  10. Loki…a truly inciteful and informed analysis of the premise of the article. You clearly know of which you speak. For me, it’s a little less complex….tofu and soy products taste like crap and I won’t have them in my home.

  11. Exactly, Paul said it well. Unfortunately we are well on the way he describes.
    By the way, what is tofu? Sounds like something I used to shovel out of the barn.

  12. David, your last paragraph seems to also describe the Bolshevik social engineering efforts to create the “new Soviet man”.
    I to find Loki’s comments very informative and often pass them on to my nurse daughter to store in her memory bank.

  13. Loki, thanks for the side tip on B12.
    I figured that caucasians eating tofu was an early indicator of decreased mental function.

  14. Not just tofu but soybean oil in general. I HATE that the crap has found it’s way into far too many foods as an additive.

  16. Thanks for the positive comments fellow SDAers. And, of course, thanks to Kate who’s provided a location where a very eclectic and multi-talented collection of individuals can engage in discussion.
    Have read the paper and, while my dissection of the paper wasn’t as meticulous as it would be if it was being discussed at a journal club, it has certainly raised some interesting questions. First, all of the subjects in this study were Japanese and the study has been going on for over 40 years now. These are Japanese who moved to Hawaii mainly before WWII and thus they may represent a biased cohort. What was clear from the study, with p values that were less than 0.006 for the most part, is that there was a clear dose-response effect of tofu consumption and dementia. The effect was modest but persisted when the investigators tried multiple correction factors to see if they were associated.
    Given that soy isoflavone blood concentrations are significant in people who consume large amounts of tofu, it’s curious why these weren’t measured but I suppose that’s the next study they’ll be asking to be funded.
    Isoflavones have significant estrogenic effects as well as anti-estrogenic effects and it’s not clear whether this is dependent on the isoflavone studied, concentration of the isoflavone or something else entirely. Also, isoflavones inhibit tyrosine kinase which is an important enzyme involved in phosphorylating various proteins to modify their function. In the brain, tyrosine kinase is involved in modulating activities of ion channels and neurotransmitter receptors as well as in long term potentiation at hippocampal synapses which is thought to be how memories are formed.
    If isoflavones are acting as an anti-estrogen, then this would be expected to decrease neurogenesis in the brain. Contrary to the dogma that neurons never divide, hippocampal cells are dividing throughout life and the hippocampi (which are involved in memory) of London taxi drivers are significantly larger than those of age matched controls. Also, the authors of the paper suggested that isoflavones could cause decreased brain plasticity and thus impair learning. When people get older, one of the needs for brain plasticity is to replace sections of brain destroyed by multiple tiny strokes.
    I’m eagerly awaiting the first moonbat who tries to sell me on banning certain plastics because they have “estrogen like effects”. If we ban such incredibly weak estrogens, then tofu should be immediately taken off the market. I can predict their comeback line which will almost invariably be “tofu is natural”. I then quote a line from Grace Slick’s Eat starch mom: “Poison oak is natural too so why don’t you put some in your food?”
    After reading this paper, I’ll make a point of avoiding tofu unless a future study demonstrates convincingly that tofu consumption was a correlate of something else that is more associated with neurodegeneration. And, besides, meat is far tastier like the delicious elk sausages I had for supper tonight.

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