What To Do When You Eat Soy

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Hello! Welcome to Beyond Soy!

What should you do if you realize that you’ve eaten soy? We’ve previously talked about recovering from eating soy, but today I want to focus on learning from your experience. Since we don’t intentionally eat soy, there are only a couple different scenarios when we accidentally eat it:

  • A food contained soy, and we didn’t expect it. While this sucks, it is straightforward and we can easily learn from our mistake. 
  • We made a guess about a food and were wrong. Normally when we make a guess and then Ashley feels bad we re-evaluate our guess to avoid making the same guess in the future.
  • We ate something that is soy-free, but it had cross contamination. In cases of cross contamination a food that is normally perfectly safe caused a reaction because soy was present in/on the food. This is the worst situation and can cause a lot of frustration as we check what she ate and find nothing that should contain soy. We still try to learn from these situations. If we can’t find any reason for the food to contain soy, we might try it again (often from a different manufacturer).   
IMAGE VIA PIXABAY

IMAGE VIA PIXABAY

To avoid repeating our mistakes and to learn from the situations when we eat soy, we always try to identify the food or specific ingredient that contained soy. Then we try to avoid the food (or specific ingredient) going forward. Once we’ve pinpointed the food that contained soy, we do a little research (look at recipes, similar foods, a detailed look at the ingredient list) to find soy-free alternatives and understand how prevalent the food is. Once we’ve figured out exactly what to avoid going forward and where to look for it, we usually don’t run into problems again with that food. For example, Ashley had a reaction one time when we used non-stick spray that contained soy lecithin. We were never completely certain that the non-stick spray caused the problem, but now we only use completely soy-free non-stick spray. If we can’t identify the food or ingredient that contained soy we’ll be very careful around all the foods that could have been the problem, but we usually won’t avoid anything unless we know for certain that it contains soy. After all, it could be a case of cross contamination.

It is definitely not fun to accidentally eat soy, but by learning from our mistakes, we ensure that we have a better chance of avoiding the food or ingredient containing soy in the future.