Tip for the protein drink people

[Sindawe]

As an accountant, I wonder if I could get away with that.  Prepare a tax return or a financial statement, then a little while later smack my forehead and proclaim "Dayum, you really didn't have a profit; it was a huge loss".  Or "You really don't get a refund; you owe a bundle".

No, I don't think you'd get away with that.  Accounting and Science are two different disciplines.  Based on what I know of accounting, it deals with known values and known procedures, aimed at keeping track of financial data and the like.  Science deals with the exploration of the unknown in order to make it known.  Sometimes they may overlap, such as discovering new rules and formulas for handing and manipulating financial data or making projections using formula, then seeing how well the projection fits reality, or handling and manipulating experimental data so that it makes sense and can be easily interpreted.  But IMHO attempting to apply standards of the accounting world to scientific discovery works as well as attempting to apply the rules of Newtonian physics (large masses at slow speeds over long periods of time) to the quantum world (small masses at high speeds over short periods of time).  In other words, it does not work.

[Lee]

All things in moderation grasshopper.  A person can do a quick study of diets heavy in soy simply by studying Asians.  There are many pluses and perhaps a negative or two. But then, so do animal proteins and nearly every other food/medicine.  
Infants have been fed soy formula for decades, and are perhaps the most closely studied group ever to consume it.  They are on it for a reason- they cannot tolerate intact milk proteins.
Its kind of like saying that you would be better off starving at the age of twelve than consuming pesticide/herbicide laced food products and dying at the age of 79 of cancer.

[Azrael256]

You guys might try here for a lot of this health related B.S. debunking.  The site doesn't say anything about soy melting your brain, but they do have a copy of the letter from the FDA nailing this Mercola fellow for being a fraudster.

As for protein shakes...  blech!  My old roommate is a vegetarian for religious reasons, so his main source of protein was these awful concoctions he would make from rice protein and fruit.  The smoothies weren't bad, but the powder was horribly bitter.  He would try to cut down on it by blending in acidic fruits, mostly apples and oranges, but it was still rather unpleasant.

The cool part was his blender.  He could puree ten apples in it.  Whole apples.  That blender could've liquified a cinder block.