Confessions of a French Soy Eater – by Olivier Lichtenberger

A bookofjoe World Exclusive™.

Long essay short: Olivier Lichtenberger believes that he lost his sense of smell as a result of ingesting soy products; the anosmia abated once he stopped consuming them.

Here's his story.

Confessions of a French Soy Eater

It is two weeks Anne since I dropped this deadly and ultimate food test or experiment. Two weeks I regain progressively my sense of smell. The first week I suffered some sort of hot flushes (or is it flash) but I don't know exactly what is is. And, maybe it was not the lack of my toxic that provoked them, the sudden frustration of my daily oestrogen dose of the four preceding months. I never had felt that. Olfactory distortions lasted up to four days ago, and nothing since. Very neat ghost smells and false odours then nothing. Yes it could come again but I had not had such a truce since February. At the end of the first week my own odour was back, body odour back and nuances and subtleties of all sort of things, tomato, ginger, basil, raw meat or potatoes... Some things are missing as olive oil that I cannot smell through the nose but the fragrance of which I unmistakably identify through the mouth then the nose and in very scarce proportions. Something has changed too in this state of slight nasal congestion when waking-up. It is some very relative congestion nothing as a nasal obstruction, never known that; just a slight discomfort. Since the first days of my new healthy diet, this relative soreness vanishes in minutes after I am up, with this sensation of relief that succeed a voluntary deglutition move we force to balance the air pressure in our ears, passing a tunnel or in an elevator or in a plane an air pocket. A sudden effect and instantly releasing.

So, I at the end of my test I had three days of total anosmia for four days, the rest of the time vague odours faintly consistent with the reality, but mostly discordant smells with or without identifiable stimulus or in connection with a unusual common but real odour or more or less untimely as motor exhaust or fumes down in the street or else the air shaft of a restaurant in the neighbourhood, all odours I interpreted falsely. This impression is often described in the anosmia groups. It is as if the corruption of the smell was provoked by a filter altering the real odour or deafening it as a coloured filters adulterate normal vision of colours. But it has never been a torture for me Anne as it has been for you. And I can very easily hold my smelling appendix without my hands nor any cotton ball. For me it never has been but a eeriness or a dramatic and horrifying loss. Before the day where I found out, it was the hellish abyss of some degeneration in progress.

Bon! Je ne l'ai toujours pas dit, Anne! But the name of the site from where you read this page tells you the name of my toxic, the ex-staple food of mine I identified as THE toxic to be blamed for my anosmia. You see it is very simple. All I had to do was to think of it then try and strike it off my shopping list. And this two years of total anosmia were past history in only ten days. (excepting the multiple tests I ran since... and am finished with.)

This experience of intoxication (beginning fall 2003) I already narrated it to you. I shall tell it here anew, trying (!!!) to be more specific and clear. I told you you all but the name of the poison. It was very difficult, for you too, hard to understand why I did not want to tell it. I tried to explain. I shall do it again. Here. I expect to be the limpidest.

This evening my blue bottle of gin exhale its perfume "d'eau de toilette chic". This evening ginger is no more first of all a burning sting but a fragrant marvel.

Soy. I tried it several decades ago without much enthusiasm. I got back to soy with pleasure perchance, falling in love with a woman who did not like it at all but convinced me to try. It was fall 2003. The soy took the place of my daily ration of milk (3 1/8 oz three times a day; plus all kind of food with soy as a component : "dairy" products, biscuits and confectionery, prepared "meat" ice-creams, beverages...)

I did not make the link with my anosmia/dysosmia, I knew it from long but it was something so labile and in so short lapses that I did not really took care of. It was just enough intriguing to be funny : I never refused having "bizarreries". I blamed swimming or some cold snap for my anosmia, and dysosmia I spoke of as olfactory delusions when I tried to describe it to close friends or family rather astonished or sceptical and afraid or even comforted to hold at last a proof of my latent insanity. I wore that with a sort of sarcastic glee. A painter and slightly colour-blind I was now odour-blind!

It was only several weeks or months later that I began to realise : total anosmia had gradually but surely took place. And then I was very afraid. And much more afraid that browsing the web I soon discovered the identity of my troubles, the names and facts and the grisly reality : nobody knows much or even anything about that ailment and even olfaction to begin with. And nobody is close to know much more. Nothing to be found of great interest else that nobody knows much. But a bunch of charlatans. But some notions relating this impairment with Alzheimer's!!! Ghastliness!

Two years it went dreadfully so. Till the day where I described these gloomy circumstances to my psychiatrist, whining one more time. I told her in the same time that I knew since when it had turned to a complete anosmia. And that I knew the coincidence with the beginning of my new "food" regimen. She told me to stop eating it, very easy... Without her I could have go on and on. After all I had had bouts of anosmia long before this regime. And I really preferred my coffee with soy "milk" rather than with milk. And all these soy foods or soy containing foods were nice enough most of the time.

Thus I stopped eating soy, TOTALLY, or to be exact, almost totally. Because soy is everywhere. Everywhere in prepared food; nearly all that is not raw food is likely to be improved, bettered, enriched, enhanced by or with soy under forms or shapes more or less disguised or hidden but also sometimes glorified, gentrified. So, avoiding soy is all but easy. You should cook all by yourself to be sure not to eat soy : meat, vegetables, bread, pastry, gravies, snacks... But even so, you should absorb soy in a multitude of pharmaceutical stuff, cosmetic stuff, cleaning, sticking, ink and paint stuff, candle and soap stuff... Plus, soon, in your SUV. It is now a century and a half that soy industry flourishes.

I went back to the web where I found very entertaining things about soy and olfaction. And I found too these forum and groups where anosmia is discussed.

And among these findings the most strange thing : there is in French-speaking and English-speaking groups only one other person to have found what I had found. But after his statement. He never spoke of it again. Must be said that nobody appeared to have heard. Or this person did not believe in what he had observed, or he is (as I have been since three years) "lurking around" forum and groups anosmia oriented. But knowing that this person is a plaintiff in one of these lawsuit against Zicam and that lawyers have enjoined their clients not to make untimely statements on the subject, it is not surprising.

I have quickly realised it was an astounding discovery, that I held something about what lots of ENTs, neurologists, olfaction researchers try to find and maybe after try to explain in vain since one (several) century(ies).

Searching the web about soy I think I have understood some things. Some about anosmia, about olfaction but also about soy industry and its following and support by medicine, science and governments.

Soy is a neurotoxic and particularly for the olfactory system.

And The Emperor ? "But he hasn't got anything on" says the child.