A magical bean from Asia which brings us such wholesome goodies as soy sauce, soy milk, tofu and soy bomb. One of the few foods containing all of the essential amino acids. Soy with rice will keep you alive indefinitely without too much malnutrition, though it might do you good to have an orange once in a while too.

There are two species of soy** that are used as food crops: Glycine max (common "soybean") and Glycine soja ("wild soybean"). According to the NCBI taxonomy browser (which plays fast and loose with its taxonomy), the lineage of SOY! is...
Superkingdom Eukaryota (eukaryotes)
Kingdom Viridiplantae (green plants)
Streptophyta
Charophyta/Embryophyta group

Phylum Embryophyta (higher plants)
Tracheophyta (vascular plants)
Euphyllophyta
Spermatophyta (seed plants)
Magnoliophyta (flowering plants aka. angiospermae)
eudicotyledons

Subclass Rosidae
Order Fabales
Family Fabaceae
Subfamilty Papilionoideae
Genus Glycine

**aka. soya, soja, soybean, soyabean, sojabean

Note the total lack of any class in the proletari...I mean, ::lineage above::. There is no One True Taxonomy eg. in some classifications, the flowering plants constitute a class (Angiospermae) and in others a division (Magnoliophyta or Anthophyta).

I recently stumbled across the following headline in Scientific American:

Eating Soy Boosts Tamoxifen's Powers

Since I know of my fellow noders' interest, affection and even love of the brown gold *, I thought it'd be appreciated if I relayed said information.

The magazine reports that a recent study strongly suggested what the above headline says. This was presented at the annual conference of the American Association of Cancer Research, New Orleans, last Wednesday.

"Tamoxifen" you say, "what is that?"  Well, if you for some reason don't want to read girlotron's excellent writeup on the subject, let me just tell you that it's a "nonsteroidal estrogen antagonist" used for treating breast cancer, specifically estrogen-dependent tumors. It is also given prophylactically to some risk groups.

As you can see, this is further evidence of what akf2000 mentions under "Pros" in the previous writeup of this node. It turns out that by combining soy and tamoxifen, cancer tumors in their experiment was largely reduced compared to using only either of the two. The experiment was performed on carcinogen-induced tumors in rats, and gave the following result:

 

                             Reduction of  
                 Medication  number of tumors
                 ----------  ----------------
                 Tamoxifen   29 % 
                 Soy         37 %

                 Both 
                 combined    62 %          
 

My impression - given the results of the two "medications" by themselves - would of course be that

Eating Tamoxifen Boosts Soy's Powers

but that wouldn't help funding cancer research, I guess. The next step will be tests on humans, according to Andreas Constantinou of University of Illinois, Chicago.


Source: Scientific American

In Spanish, "Soy"= "I am"

Useful for "Soy guapo" = "I am handsome"
"Soy feo" = "I am ugly"

"Pienso que por lo tanto soy" = "I think therefore I am"

SOY is an acronym used by many not for profit organizations. Most commonly the acronym is found to stand for Support Our Youth as it is in Northern Indiana. There SOY raises money through various community-oriented activities such as their Dusk To Dawn Relay, which is in turn used for many youth related programs. Though this is just one example of the acronym meaning Support Our Youth, its repeated use does not necessarily mean a connected organization State to State or country to country. In Toronto, for example, SOY, in mission, raises the quality of life for gay, lesbian, and transgender youth.

SOY has also been used by organizations to mean:

Furthermore it is used as an acronym in awards:

Soy (?), n. [Chinese shoyu.]

1.

A Chinese and Japanese liquid sauce for fish, etc., made by subjecting boiled beans (esp. soja beans), or beans and meal, to long fermentation and then long digestion in salt and water.

2. Bot.

The soja, a kind of bean. See Soja.

 

© Webster 1913.

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