Do you have questions about nutrition? Send us to comer@lavanguardia.es, our nutritionist Aitor Sánchez will answer all your questions.
Hello, Aitor. Yesterday at a meal with my friends, one of them told me that soy sauce is harmful to your health. Especially because it can cause breast cancer, among other negative effects on the body. She recommended I replace it with another sauce made with coconut vinegar. That's right? Should we eliminate soy sauce from our diet? (Cristina Macipe, reader)
Hello Cristina,
Don't worry because the information you mentioned at lunch with friends about soy sauce is not true. Furthermore, it doesn't make much sense to replace it with vinegar, much less coconut. It is not a good nutritional or culinary substitution, because it is difficult to exchange one sauce for another in a recipe or with a specific function, unless it is simply a dressing.
But soy sauce does have a nutritional drawback, and that is that it is very high in salt. If we could warn about it, in any case we could recommend not taking it excessively for the same reasons that we tell the general population not to abuse salt/sodium (hypertension or gastric cancer). Soy sauce should always be used taking into account that you are already adding salt to the preparation, whether it is a soup, sushi, rice or any other sauce.
Regarding the soy and cancer alerts, they are one of the many hoaxes that come with noise about this legume, which are especially accentuated in Europe and especially in Spain. But the consumption of soy and its derivatives, especially fermented ones, is positively associated with the prevention of diseases in general and, specifically, cancer.
If these statements were true, there would be a food alert on soy consumption issued by one of the entities in charge of this (EFSA – AESAN), and it has never happened. On the other hand, we do have them on the consumption of sausages, salted meats, fried foods, alcoholic beverages... It is more important than ever to clarify these issues so as not to contribute to misinformation.
Do blueberries and raspberries lose properties when blended? (Rosana Lilia Villegas, reader)
Hello Rosana,
It is true that squeezing or blending a fruit significantly impacts its dietary properties. We have insisted a lot that a juice is never equivalent to taking a whole piece of fruit. The reason is that when preparing it, the pulp of the fruit is lost, and with it the juice has a series of more acute impacts on our body than if we drank it whole.
In the case of the fruits that you mention, blueberries and raspberries, just as we could include other red fruits, it should be noted that what is normally noted is their great antioxidant capacity thanks to the phytochemical compounds they possess. These compounds are hardly lost when making the juice, and, therefore, they will continue to be present in it. I qualify the “they are barely lost,” because it is true that some blending processes can heat the fruit and oxidize it more than normal. This happens due to the action of the blades, which increases the temperature of the juice and would destroy these compounds. We would have a small reduction in its content, but it would not be very significant.
In fact, some red fruit or beet juices have given very good results in sports nutrition as they are good concentrates of these products. Of course, it would be even better to be able to consume the corresponding amount through whole fresh fruit.
