When I first heard that my boyfriend couldn’t eat milk, I immediately assumed that he ate soy products. It seems like you can get soy anything nowadays, including soy milk. And then I remembered that he had soy intolerance. My initial thought was “So what do you eat?” This is a very good question, but one I will get to some other time. For now, let me focus on soy itself.
Although not as sneaky or omnipresent as gluten or corn, one ingredient that I have seen a lot of is soy lecithin, which I mentioned in my last post. Apparently it’s a common emulsifier which can be found in gum and tea. I’m sure there are other things, but I can’t think of them as of this moment. Luckily it’s pretty easy to pick out, except when I came across the ingredient “lecithin” in a list of ingredients in Good Clean Love’s Body Candy product. The company totes natural products so I assumed that the lecithin they described was a plant product, but I wasn’t sure which plant.
Curious so I was, I contacted customer services and they wrote back with almost KeVita-like speed (everything from now on will be judged in comparison with KeVita). The services-rep said that lecithin can be derived from several other plant sources different from soy, and she believed that this was the case with the product. This wasn’t 100% guaranteed, but I took some comfort that this supposed non-soy lecithin was just listed as “lecithin”. Hopefully that’ll help me make some decisions in the future.
Although, I have to wonder: is it just called “soy lecithin” because of how big the soy industry is? America is the number one producer of soy in the world, and therefore it sort of makes sense that the only lecithin people seem to come in contact with is soy-based. What did it take to corner this market? Is soy lecithin easier to produce or just easier to come by? If you have these answers, please comment.
(image taken from here)
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