**Abstract**

*Glycine max (L) Merrill,* better known as soy or soybean, is a legume of asian origin considered an excellent biotype, given the fact that it contains almost everything the human being needs for the diet. Its cultivation worldwide is one of the most important, and soy itself and its derivatives are highly on demand. The health effects of soy derived foods have been investigated for more than 25 years, and some of them remain controversial. On the other hand, we wondered if soy could be used to ameliorate the toxic effects of heavy metals. Therefore, in this chapter we review general characteristics of soy as well as its nutritional potential, and we compiled the newest information about the health effects of soy. In order to test our hypothesis, we developed a model of animals exposed to cadmium, and we gave them a soy based diet, comparing it with a casein-based diet as control. This allowed us to collect information about its effect on the respiratory and nervous system. Among the results of this review, we show that it reduces the cholesterol level and obesity while also having antidiabetic effects. We enumerate the benefits of soy-based diets on the respiratory system, such as protection against lung cancer and radiotherapy, better lung function in asthma patients and protection against cadmium intoxication. In the cardiovascular system it reduces the risk of coronary heart disease, improves blood pressure, glycemic control, and inflammation while it reduces not all but some of the alterations induced by cadmium exposure on the aorta and heart. It apparently promotes neurogenesis, improves cognitive functions, and reduces the oxidative stress and apoptosis induced by cadmium exposure in the cerebellum. Taken all together, this information let us conclude that soy consumption would exhibit numerous benefits for human health, although future studies should try to elucidate the best outcome considering variables such as gender, age, treatment duration and dosage of soy products consumption in the diet.

**Keywords:** Soybean, cadmium, oxidative stress, anti inflammatory

#### **1. Introduction**

Soybean has been consumed in many countries since before recorded history. The health effects of soy derived foods have been investigated for more than 25 years. Actually, more than 2000 soy related articles are published annually. Most of the research is conducted because there is evidence that soy has beneficial effects on health, specially preventing chronic diseases.

In our laboratory, we specialize in the effect of heavy metals intoxication on different organs and given the fact that soy is known for its antioxidant properties, we wanted to study if the addition of soy in the diets of exposed animals would ameliorate the deleterious effects of a heavy metal.

In this chapter, we begin providing some background information about soy characteristics and nutritional information; but the main intent of this review is to provide a compilation of the current understanding of the health effects of soybean derived foods mainly on the lipid profile and on different systems such as the respiratory system, the cardiovascular system and the central nervous system. We made a search compiling the most relevant works in the field and added our most outstanding results regarding the possible uses of soy to counteract some environmental intoxications.
