Dear lemmy, someone very close to my heart is starting to fall into conspiracy theories. It’s heartbreaking. Among other things, he has now told me that soy beans are not supposed to be consumed by human beings and is convinced that despite the literal centuries of human soy bean cultivation and consumption, we shouldn’t eat it or anything derived from it for this reason (ie tofu, soy sauce, etc…evidence that soy is present in other common foods doesn’t seem to register with him).
I don’t even know where he got this information from and can’t find a single source to back it up (even disingenuously). I’ve tried explaining to him that sure, in its original state it’s not edible, but undergoes processing (LIKE MANY OTHER FOODS) to become edible. And that this has gone on since at least the 11th century, so it’s not like Big Soy is trying to poison the little people.
He’s normally a very reasonable and intelligent person, and I don’t know how to reach him. I thought it might be helpful to show him where these myths have come from with hard data sources to prove it. He seems open to the possibility, so I don’t think he’s a lost cause yet!
Help?
Humans have been cultivating soybeans for an estimated 9000 years. To think that a food staple in so many cultures worldwide is not healthy is completely xenophobic. Maybe don’t tell him that, but the framing of different cultures might be helpful. If it wasn’t healthy humans wouldn’t have thrived spending resources to grow it.
People have been brewing liquor for thousands of years too.
EDIT: I’m not arguing that soy beans are unhealthy, just that the reasoning is flawed.
And it’s effect on the human body is widely known. You’re not making the point you’re trying to.
I think the point was just that the argument was flawed.
Flawed in that a staple of civilizations’ diets is somehow comparable to a known intoxicant?
To say something is good merely because it has been consumed for a long period.
Very often people use a terrible argument and reach the right conclusion by chance.
Precisely, the conclusion is correct but the argument was flawed.
Except it’s not chance dude. Soy is one of the richest and cheapest sources of protein.
I agree with you, but we should not compromise logic just to confirm what we believe.
Just add what you want to say as if we were having a normal conversation. Do you talk to people you know like this? So fucking exhausting dude.
I tried to point out that the fact that societies have consumed it for a long amount of time doesn’t inherently imply it’s healthy.
I made a single point, that soy conspiracies are racist and dismiss the civilizations that were raised on them. You latched onto one bit in a dismissive (or ignorant) attempt to debate bro with me. Which is especially jarring if you agree with me when you could have just added a point.
Alcoholic drinks, for a good part of history, were safer to drink than water because its production includes a boiling step that kills bacteria. We know now that you have to boil or treat water before drinking but for most of history alcohol was safer.
dude people back then knew how to sanitize water, this just isn’t true.
The only time you might prefer alcohol over water because it’s safer is in some sort of disaster or emergency.
Or because it provided both hydration and calories to people doing manual labor, like field work. It was the Gatorade of the time.
huh yeah i never thought about that but it would be a nice benefit.
i’d expand on that with that you could have also used something like a very dilute gruel except that would go nasty in the heat, which alcohol doesn’t do because it’s already nasty (but perfectly drinkable).
They did not know to sanitize water pre germ theory, during cholera outbreaks they would just keep drinking the untreated contaminated water and infecting themselves.
Because it wasn’t obvious that there had been contact with sewer water, if people go out of their way to get water from a pump that tastes “sweet” then they obviously do not understand that there’s sewage in it, as humans universally agree that drinking sewage is disgusting.
It doesn’t take germ theory to figure out that funky water tends to make you sick, and ever since we invented fire and had access to waterproof vessels people would have realized that boiling water made it safe. People just don’t tend to bother with such things when they get comfortable, much like how we now very much know about bacteria and yet people don’t bother washing their hands after taking a dump.
They didn’t know it had anything to do with the water at all, they thought it was evil smells.
The problem is that water is very often contaminated without seeming contaminated. If you drink water out of a random stream in the woods that looks and tastes totally clean you will still very likely get sick, for example. Would people in the past have understood that it was the water from the stream that made them sick? I think they normally would not have made the connection. It’s normal even now when people get ecoli or something from salad, to end up believing the cause was something else before it gets officially tracked down, because what actually happened didn’t match their expectations, they weren’t thinking about salad as a possibility. Our natural disgust for the most obvious signs of disease is woefully inadequate and does not at all translate directly into an accurate understanding of how disease works and why it happens.
And it has shaped human culture like perhaps no other food item has.
This is a conspiracy theory, not unlike the theories you will hear on the right. I’ve never heard anyone on the right equate soy with Asian or other cultures.
Which is a hole in thier own logic, my point entirely.