Why Fat is the Preferred Fuel for Human Metabolism
- Thread starter DT-waw
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Agree. Eliminating all animal foods requires supplementation of deficient nutrients, ie possibly zinc, B12, vit D, and protein powder to make up for lacking essential amino acids.
What other essential nutrient might be missing in the vegan diet that hasn't been identified yet?
The China Study is a cross population snapshot not proper prospective epidemiology, as such is severely flawed and should be ignored.
They looked at how much meat was consumed in an entire province and then the rates of disease in the province as a whole, and then compared the two variables to another province. If provinces with more meat consumption also have more heart disease they inferred that meat causes heart disease.
This is meaningless!
For instance, the japanese smoke more than Americans, they also die less of lung cancer. That doesn't mean that smoking is protective for lung cancer; and you can prove this with proper prospective epidemiology because within either one of those populations individuals who smoke at time "X" are more likely to die of lung cancer several years out.
Read the valid criticism of the CS!
Here's a proper prospective epidemiological study:
Mortality in vegetarians and nonvegetarians: detailed findings from a collaborative analysis of 5 prospective studies.
Am J Clin Nutr. 1999 Sep;70(3 Suppl):516S-524S.
PMID: 10479225
"ovolacto vegetarians get moderately less heart disease than
either full vegans"
After more than 3 years on a whole foods plant based diet, a B12 supplement is recommended if your levels are low, because your body stores B12 for about 7 years. The amount you need can be found in a basic One-A-Day type vitamin.
All other nutrients are provided in abundance on this diet. There is no doubt about this. You can perform a nutritional analysis of the diet and confirm this. As long as you're consuming foods from each food group - beans, grains, fruits, and vegetables - and you're not restricting calories to the levels most standard diets require, you'll get all required nutrients and amino acids needed for optimal health, without the dangers of excess fats, concentrated toxins, and refined addictive "calorie bombs" such as cakes, cookies, pies, cheese and ice cream.
No supplements are necessary, unlike the Atkins Diet which recommends a plethora of supplements to compensate for the diet's extremely low nutrient density.
It still amazes me that you guys talk about The China Study based on what others have said about it, yet you haven't read the book or the entire study. The experiments that led to the epidemiological Cornell China Project are the most powerful part of the book.
The China Project itself was undertaken to see if there was a correlation between high animal protein consumption and higher rates of chronic disease such as heart disease and cancer as indicated there might be based on the astonishing laboratory results.
It was anything but a "snapshot"! It was the most comprehensive study ever of its kind, to this day. 367 variables were studied in populations from 65 counties and 100 adults from each one. Two villages were selected from each county to ensure higher quality data. Variables were measured in several ways to avoid error. It involved 24 health teams, each with 12-15 health workers trained to carry out blood, food and urine collections and complete a large variety and number of detailed ongoing questionnaires. The study was funded by both the U.S. National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Chinese Health Ministry and took place over a ten-year period of time. It involved several million dollars of funding.
Nearly every other human study on diet and health involved subjects consuming a rich Western diet, where the difference between vegetarians and non-vegetarians isn't all that strong (most vegetarians here consume large amounts of dairy, fats and even chicken and fish, clearly not vegetarian).
In these Chinese provinces there were very distinct dietary differences and huge differences in rates of cancer that correlated to the dietary differences.
Campbell and his team didn't "infer" that meat consumption caused heart disease. They presented the results of the study and also documented many correlations between fat consumption and disease and between animal protein consumption and disease in many countries around the world, not just China. The Cornell China Project produced the kinds of associations between diet and disease that one would have expected from the studies in lab animals conducted by Dr. Campbell.
Dr. Campbell himself writes: "Standing alone, it [the China Study] does not prove that diet causes disease. Absolute proof in science is nearly unattainable. Instead a theory is proposed and debated until the weight of evidence is so overwhelming that everyone commonly accepts that the theory is most likely true. In the case of diet and disease, the China Study adds a lot of weight to the evidence."
The last six chapters of The China Study provide an in-depth look into the powerful for-profit industries on which the popular media depend. These popular media outlets provide almost all the news the average American is exposed to. The final chapters reveal reasons these companies and their well-funded marketing arms have for suppressing damaging truths and the methods they use to promote junk science designed to keep you confused.
Here's a small example of what's done on a regular basis:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46_GInjBeQU&feature=relmfu
It's quite possibly the amount of fat in the diet:
"An unhealthy diet will increase a person's susceptibility to known causes of lung disease, such as allergens, tobacco smoke, infectious agents, and air pollution. One of the best examples of the importance of diet and lung health is demonstrated by the low incidence of lung cancer among Japanese cigarette smokers. The risk of lung cancer in the United States is at least 10 times higher than in Japanese living in Japan despite the higher percentage of smokers among the Japanese.(1) Smokers of Japanese descent living in the US have the same incidence of lung cancer as do the rest of Americans. These findings point to the importance of the differences in the diets followed in Japan and the US. The starch-based (rice and vegetable) diet followed by most Japanese smokers allows the body to defend and repair the damages from smoked tobacco far more effectively than does a diet of fat and protein (meat and dairy products), the American diet.
Many large population studies have shown that people who eat healthier diets, meaning more vegetables and fewer animal foods, have less lung disease.(2-6) One study of 52,325 participants found that individuals whose diets are rich in meat reported new onset of persistent coughs with phlegm 43 percent more often than those who consume a diet high in fruit." - John McDougall, M.D.
References:
1) Stellman SD, Takezaki T, Wang L, Chen Y, Citron ML, Djordjevic MV, Harlap S, Muscat JE, Neugut AI, Wynder EL, Ogawa H, Tajima K, Aoki K. Smoking and lung cancer risk in American and Japanese men: an international case-control study. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2001 Nov;10(11):1193-9.
2) Butler LM, Koh WP, Lee HP, Tseng M, Yu MC, London SJ; Singapore Chinese Health Study. Prospective study of dietary patterns and persistent cough with phlegm among Chinese Singaporeans. Am J Respir Crit Care Med. 2006 Feb 1;173(3):264-70.
3) Walda IC, Tabak C, Smit HA, Râ°sâ°nen L, Fidanza F, Menotti A, Nissinen A, Feskens EJ, Kromhout D. Diet and 20-year chronic obstructive pulmonary disease mortality in middle-aged men from three European countries. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2002 Jul;56(7):638-43.
4) Jiang R, Paik DC, Hankinson JL, Barr RG. Cured meat consumption, lung function, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease among United States adults. Am J Respir Crit Care Med. 2007 Apr 15;175(8):798-804.
5) Varraso R, Jiang R, Barr RG, Willett WC, Camargo CA Jr. Prospective study of cured meats consumption and risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in men. Am J Epidemiol. 2007 Dec 15;166(12):1438-45.
6) Varraso R, Willett WC, Camargo CA Jr. Prospective study of dietary fiber and risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease among US women and men. Am J Epidemiol. 2010 Apr 1;171(7):776-84.
Check out the huge disparity in fat intake between the Japanese and American diets:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1618693
Just as the title implies, this was a meta-analysis (a study of selected studies), not a "proper epidemiological study". It looked at data from five analytical studies to compare death rates from common diseases between vegetarians and non-vegetarians. The five studies took place between 1959 through 1984, two from California, two from the U.K. and one from Germany, all countries with similar rich Western diets, which this analysis makes quite clear in the Discussion:
"We believe that the 5 studies analyzed here are the only large,
prospective studies that included a large proportion of subjects
following a Western-style vegetarian diet. Therefore, the results
presented represent most of the information available on comparisons of mortality between Western vegetarians and nonvegetarians with broadly similar lifestyles."
These were shallow studies, based strictly on questionnaires. No blood or urine was tested, no food samples collected. The vegetarians ranged from those who'd followed the vegetarian diet for less than 5 years to those greater than 5 years.
Compare that to the Cornell China Project in which the 89-94% of the participants had lived in their province their entire lives and had eaten the same way throughout their lives as a result.
Also, this analysis made assumptions (not good science):
"The number of vegans was small, so the analyses in Table 7 were repeated with the inclusion of data from the Health Food Shoppers Study, making the assumptions that all nonvegetarians were regular meat eaters and that vegetarians who reported that they did not consume dairy products were vegans."
How do you consider this meta-analysis of five limited analyses, with assumptions made, a proper epidemiological study?
Despite the flaws of this meta-analysis, the results were still compelling arguments for a plant-based diet:
"Mortality from ischemic heart disease was 24% lower in vegetarians than in nonvegetarians (death rate ratio: 0.76; 95% CI: 0.62, 0.94; P < 0.01)."
Also, "the numbers of deaths from individual cancers among vegans remained small."
Maybe it isn't, huh? Thought you were so sure the CS settled this ?
http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fallac/
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AND:
"ovolacto vegetarians get moderately less heart disease than
either full vegans"
Try bison. Lean, healthy compare to chicken beef and pork.
I have this for the first time here: http://www.25gourmetburgers.com/beefburgers.htm
no cheese, no mayo, but delicious!! NoDoji, they have vegetarian burger too for you.
I have this for the first time here: http://www.25gourmetburgers.com/beefburgers.htm
no cheese, no mayo, but delicious!! NoDoji, they have vegetarian burger too for you.
Me thinks NoDoji likes too much the sound of his/her own voice
Why do you keep citing Denise Minger as a refutation of the China Study? Is it that likely that an amateur blogger, with no academic training in the subject matter would, along with WPF, be the only ones to uncover the fact that the raw data actually disproves the Cornell China project conclusions and decades of peer reviewed published research? Plus, Minger in her blogs claims that being a vegan made her mentally ill and anoxic. How credible is she?
In case you haven't seen it, here is Campbell's response to Minger: http://www.tcolincampbell.org/fileadmin/Presentation/finalmingercritique.pdf