Striving4Zen

World's Healthiest Foods, a site dedicated to eating whole foods to achieve good health, provides some insight on many of today's meat substitutes - i.e., TVP, soy protein isolate, et al.

An ever-increasing number of processed foods contain soy components that have been extracted from whole soybeans and altered for manufacturing purposes. Anyone regularly eating a variety of processed foods is very like to be consuming these soybean "piece parts" that bear little resemblance to naturally occurring, whole soybeans.

Included in this list of "piece parts" are isolated soy protein, soy protein concentrate, textured soy protein (sometimes called textured vegetable protein or TVP), soy flakes, soy milk powders, and other extracts from the soybean that have little to do with its whole food benefits.

In addition to these unnaturally fabricated soy components, there's been an increasing tendency in the marketplace to devalue soy for any of its unique health benefits, and to treat it instead like nothing more than a meat substitute. This approach leads to the manufacturing of soy products that are less and less comparable to traditionally fermented, whole soy foods in terms of nutrition and health benefits. Parts of the soybean are now found in literally thousands of packaged foods, along with marketing statements about the value of soy. But these isolated parts of the bean do not count as the food itself.

Labels: fermented, frankenfoods, healthy diet, meat substitute, soy protein, soybeans, TVP, vegetarian