No Happy Cows. John Robbins

accumulated, sales and consumption skyrocketed. Books like The Simple Soybean and Your Health, Tofu Cookery, and The Book of Tofu helped spread the word. Annual soy milk sales, which amounted to only a few million dollars in the early 1980s, have now soared to more than a billion dollars. And it's not just soy milk; it's all soy foods. From 1996 to 2011, annual soy food sales in the U.S. literally quintupled—increasing from $1 billion to $5 billion.

      But, according to Fallon and Enig, this is all a tragic mistake, because soy is far indeed from living up to the many health claims that its proponents have made for it. Quite the contrary, they say: “[T]he soybean contains large quantities of natural toxins or ‘antinutrients,’ (including) potent enzyme inhibitors that block the action of trypsin and other enzymes needed for protein digestion…. They can produce serious distress, reduced protein digestion, and chronic deficiencies in amino acid uptake.”