Engineered Soybean-Based Beverages and Their Impact on Human Health

Functional beverages are emerging as they provide nutritional and health benefits. Soybean-based beverage is one of the functional foods with continuous innovation emphasizing its importance in the human diet. Recent studies are focusing on the dark colored soybeans because of their high-potential functional properties. Various bioactive compounds found in soybean have been linked with antihypercholesterolemic and antihypertensive effects. Furthermore, regulations of diabetes, alleviation of antioxidant defense mechanism, immunomodulatory activities, and chemopreventive effects on consumption of soybean-based beverages have been documented by a substantial amount of studies. In contrast, soybeans are also known to possess unwanted side effects such as allergenic proteins and endocrine disrupting effects. In order to provide minimal health risk and increase the nutritional profile of soybean, fortification of soybean-based beverages with probiotics, micronutrients, and others are formulated. Thus, this chapter deals with types of soybeans, nutritional profile, and soybean-based functional beverages with the addition of probiotics and fortification with selected ingredients. Evidences from past studies associated with health benefits and safety assessment of soybean are also discussed.