BellaOnline Forums Food and Wine Low Carb soybeans - tofu

hi lisa and gang,

my restaurant just added tofu as an ingredient that i can add to my soup. from what i have read, tofu is just curdled soybeans. does tofu basically have the exact same nutritional content of soybeans ?

A cube is about 2g per cube. Yes, "tofu" means "bean curd" in Japanese <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Mostly tofu is known for its protein, not really for having a ton of vitamins in it ... it's eaten by a lot of vegetarians for the protein.

http://www.nsrl.uiuc.edu/aboutsoy/soynutrition.html

from udo erasmus,

the fat percent of soy oil is

omega3 - 9%
omega6 - 50%
omega9 - 26%
saturated - 15%

so an excellent fat breakdown.

Hmmmm that's 11g of total fat for 1/2 cup of tofu - I'd be hard pressed to eat 1/2 cup of it in a serving. So that's 1g about of omega 3 for that 1/2 cup.

In any case, here's a study that shows fish oil is better than soy oil for heart health -

http://www.chestjournal.org/cgi/content/full/127/4/1102

Also most people get WAY too much Omega-6 and should in fact be eating less of it.

So I'd go with fish if you can, and have soy as a back-up.

hi lisa,

i dont put much stock in studies, to begin with. but i find it even stupid to compare fish oil and soy oil, and try to say which is better.

it is one thing to compare one apple with another, but quite another to compare an apple with an orange.

fish oil and soy oil dont have close to the same type of ingredients.

even if i was not a vegetarian, and could eat fish oil, i would not do so for nutritional reasons.

first, we would need to define what fish. is this a cold water fish or a warm water fish. different fish produce different types of oil. fish oil though in general, does not contain nearly as much essential fats as does many of the better plant oils, such as flax, safflower, soy.

the only thing that some fish oils have that most others do not, is a small percentage of the omega3 fat oils that are further down the omega3 chain (i think they use the terms epa and dha for them, if i recall correctly).

they tout these two fats, because some times our bodies are out of balance enough that we cant produce them ourselves. my retort to this is - you had better dang well get your body back into better balance, because that aint the only dang problem you are having. lol.

i take full nutritional panels, and found that my body readily converts the first omega3 fat into its further constituents. no surprise there. so that one little goody about fish oil is of absolutely no use to me.

what i have done in the past 6 months is to stop taking all oils in oil form. since fats are so easily suspect to just about everything, i want to get all of them in foods, where they are still completely protected.

for omega3, the very best choice is flax meal. there is not even a close second. 35% of flax is fat, and of that fat, 58% of it is omega3. so just take however much you need of it, to meet your omega3 requirements.

then nuts and seeds and soybeans will give you all the omega6 and omega9 fats that you need. just make sure that you understand the omega6/omega9 fat breakdown of the various nuts and seeds that you consume, so that you get enough of both.

as far as vitamins and minerals, at least in foods, nothing really compares to our fruits and vegetables. however, i still take a full regimen of vits and mins, simply because i dont think it is possible to get our optimum amount of them from just the foods that we eat. for example, i take in about 4 grams of vitamin c and bioflavonoids in pill form, and take the 100 mg vitamin b pill twice a day. there is no way i could ever get that much in my food.

I definitely agree with you that all humans need to take vitamins - I don't think we could devise any daily diet that gets you all your USRDA every day.

I don't think we have to worry about anybody getting not enough Omega 6, so that's not really an issue. It's really Omega 3 that most people have to worry about.

I haven't done a lot of research into types of Omega 3, so thanks for bringing that up! I will make that my next thing to study <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

hi lisa,

i know we read everywhere that we get enough omega6, but i dont know if i buy that. most fats in the foods that people eat, have been processed (either chemically, or with heat). being that omega6 is twice unsaturated, it does not hold up that well. better than thrice unsaturated omega3, but not that good.

so for example, cooking/frying fish is gonna change the quality of the omega3 fats that might have been there. i suspect the same is true of roasted nuts and seeds.

omega9 is not hurt much - but 3 and 6 are, so i wonder if we get enough of either of those 2, in their true form.

as far as the different types of omega3 fats : most, if not all, nutrients have what is called a "metabolic chain". there are probably other names that it is referred by - but basically it is the complete "chain of events", as one nutrient is changed to another, as it goes thru its full process. the body probably uses some of the nutrient at each stage of its transformation.

all the omega3 fats have 3 double bonds at the same point. the main difference is how long the molecule gets to be (i.e. how many carbon fragments are added to the end of it.

all of our amino acids have this same sort of "metabolic chain".

metabolic pathway is probably the most used name - i couldnt come up with that before - must not be getting enough of something - LOL.

Hmmm an interesting question, I'll look into that. I think tho if people were really deficient that researchers could figure that out - so if they are finding that everyone is not showing a deficiency, then they're probably getting enough. I think the studies I read said we get way too much, so even if say we only can use half of it in that form, we're still getting ehough.

hi lisa,

most studies are so poor, that i dont put much stock in them.

but what type of research are we talking about here ? if it is anything but the advanced bloodwork that i have referred to in the past, it is meaningless.

and i suspect that most, if not all, is based upon what is consumed.