Mon, Feb-24-20, 12:13
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Senior Member
Posts: 14,684
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Plan: EpiPaleo/Primal/LowOx
Stats: 220/130/150
BF:
Progress: 129%
Location: USA
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Are Products with Soy Lecithin Safe to Eat?
Some interesting thoughts and info from Dr. Cate.
In a recent article, Are Products with Soy Lecithin Safe to Eat? (Like Chocolate & Ice Cream), she covers this common additive in processed foods.
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Is soy lecithin bad? It’s not great. The reason it’s not great is that anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of the fatty acids in soy lecithin are polyunsaturated and therefore prone to oxidizing and breaking down into toxins like 4 hydroxynonenal, among others, during storage and heating. What’s more, once our body fat accumulates too many polyunsaturated fatty acids we can lose our ability to burn it. (This is discussed in detail in my 2020 book, The FATBURN FIX)
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As so often, it’s a processed thing used instead of food, which is more expensive and less stable. For one thing, it’s a substitute for egg yolks.
Quote:
If you’ve ever tried to whip up mayo yourself using egg yolks and oil, you know that the egg yolk is essential for keeping the air/oil mixture stable and making your mayo nice and thick and white and creamy. Without the egg yolk, you might whip a few bubbles into your oil, but they won’t hold for more than a few minutes.
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So you can tell where this is leading:
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The highest soy lecithin content food might be mayo. Most mayo these days contains soy lecithin instead of whole egg yolks. The manufacturers of products like veganaise like to claim their mayo is healthy because soy lecithin is healthier than egg yolks, but that’s nonsense because eggs are healthy. According to Chef Debbie Lee, mayo made with soy lecithin would contain about 2 ounces per quart, or 6% by weight.
Chocolate on the other hand contains much less soy lecithin than veganaise mayo, somewhere around 0.4% according to an article posted on FoodDensity.com, which seems chemically credible to me. Many of the more boutique brands of chocolate do not use any soy lecithin.
Should I avoid chocolate or other foods that contain soy lecithin? Here’s my bottom line: Chocolate’s ok. But as for the rest, it’s best to avoid the lot.
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Which I do. Between avoiding packaged foods and anything with soy, I do pretty well.
And it’s another reason to avoid all but the best chocolate
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