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  #1   ^
Old Mon, Feb-24-20, 12:13
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WereBear WereBear is online now
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Default 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.


Quote:
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)


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.


So you can tell where this is leading:

Quote:
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.


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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  #2   ^
Old Fri, Feb-28-20, 09:37
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Calianna Calianna is online now
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I'm not sure where she's finding that "Most mayo these days contains soy lecithin instead of whole egg yolks", since the biggest national brands of real mayo (Hellman's regular mayo, Kraft real mayo, even the Aldi knock-off of Hellman's) say that they have whole eggs and egg yolks in them. The oil used is soybean, but there's no lecithin as such listed in the ingredients (even though lecithin is a component of soy oil, and the soy oil itself certainly isn't great).

Now if we're talking about light mayos, those have a far different ingredient list, although with a quick search, I still didn't see any that directly listed lecithin as an ingredient, or completely eliminated eggs (I probably didn't spend enough time searching), although the one made with olive oil had less egg than salt, which means something else was thickening it and and stabilizing the whipped oils, most likely the modified corn starch and maltodextrin.

I can certainly believe that the vegan mayos are high in lecithin though - they'd need to have something to thicken it, and even a tiny bit of egg would not be an option.
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Old Fri, Feb-28-20, 12:12
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WereBear WereBear is online now
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Vegan foods aren't foods, I agree
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Old Fri, Feb-28-20, 12:41
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I'm not sure I'm that worried about soy lecithin. Took me forever to find a vegan mayo recipe that even used the stuff. Most of the recipes had enough honey or maple syrup that I think they're more trying to make something like Miracle Whip rather than mayo. Yuck. The recipe I finally found had a teaspoon of lecithin to a cup of oil. Maybe it finds its way into the bilipid bilayers etc. more readily if the omega 6's are incorporated into phospholipids, but absolute amount per serving of mayo here is going to be pretty small. I'm willing to bet that it would be even lower in chocolate or ice cream, and the least of your problem if you eat a lot of these, at least in their usual form.
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Old Sat, Feb-29-20, 05:42
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I'm gone into a Zero-Soy mode, including my chocolate. One of the few processed foods on my plate of late.
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Old Sat, Feb-29-20, 16:51
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Quote:
Originally Posted by WereBear
I'm gone into a Zero-Soy mode, including my chocolate. One of the few processed foods on my plate of late.

I'm pretty much soy-free. I checked and the only food item containing soy I could find in my house is a container of soy sauce - which hasn't been used in over 5 years.
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