chamcham wrote:

You could just eat the "sea vegetables" that Japanese women eat, since it works for them. There are lots of asian supermarkets in the US.

In the US, iodine is usually added to salt to prevent iodine deficiencies.

From the wikipedia article for "iodised salt":

"Iodised salt (also spelled iodized salt) is table salt mixed with a minute amount of various iodine-containing salts. The ingestion of iodide prevents iodine deficiency. Worldwide, iodine deficiency affects about two billion people and is the leading preventable cause of mental retardation.[1] Deficiency also causes thyroid gland problems, including "endemic goitre". In many countries, iodine deficiency is a major public health problem that can be cheaply addressed by iodisation of salt.
"

I've heard about US salt, but there's no guarantee it helps people meet their RDA, especially among the health conscious who reduce salt consumption or switch to sea salt. This has been in effect for a long time, but the statistics I saw indicated iodine deficiency is still common. This applies to the general population, and doesn't take people with high levels of goitrogens in their diet into account. Goitrogens essentially steal iodine from your thyroid, so you need to compensate with additional iodine when you eat large amounts of them. This isn't the only issue with soy though.

If you don't have deficiencies and you're sensible about your food choices, then it's unlikely to be an issue. I'm not scaremongering, but if people can say animal protein is unhealthy because of some unconvincing theories about cholesterol, then the downsides of plants deserve to come under scrutiny too. Few diets are perfect. Nobody's actually gone on a veggie preach about the world reducing meat consumption for its health in this thread, so I'm just arguing with myself I guess.