There are quite a few reasons why you might want to start including more soy and soy products in your diet. For one, it is a great source of plant protein, which will have amazing benefits for your health, such as supplying you with fiber, boosting your lean muscle mass, as well as providing your body with essential vitamins and minerals such as calcium, folate, zinc and magnesium.
Experts consider soy to be the sole “complete” plant protein, which means that it is packed with all of the nine amino acids that the human body requires in order to sustain health and proper functioning. This is also the main reason why soy is the staple food for vegetarians and vegans.
In addition to this, experts say that soy is one of the most planet-friendly foods in the world. Accordiong to the people from the Soyfoods Association of North America, soy is a sustainable, eco-friendly food which requires much less water, land and fossil energy than any animal source of protein.
It also compares well against other foods. For instance, soy milk boasts 6.6 more grams of protein than rice milk. Dry roasted soy nuts have double the protein and half the fat than cashews. When you compare it to beef, you notice that tofu has no cholesterol at all and that it only packs one-third of the calories.
There are a number of ways in which you can introduce soy to your everyday diet:
You can include a slice of baked tempeh in your sandwiches; you can start using soy butter instead of other nut butters; you can use soy crumble instead of ground meat; you can include soy nuts in trail mix; you can include soy milk in your smoothies and you can simply start eating more tofu.
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