Meat diets vs. vegetarianism

Tim, a good start, but you need to know he elaborated upon this topic.

Go on then, we're waiting, Steve ….

Go on then, we're waiting, Steve ….

All of his writings and books are available.

All of his writings and books are available.

So that's your comeback, 47 minutes later ? Gee, thanks Steve, that's really helpful of you !

So that's your comeback, 47 minutes later ? Gee, thanks Steve, that's really helpful of you !

Hee hee. If you know Einstein's mind then you know Baruch Spinoza's I bet.

Hee hee. If you know Einstein's mind then you know Baruch Spinoza's I bet.

In a strange way, all the above has deepend my faith,
 If there is a spirit. That created the laws of nature, and all the twists and turns that life deals us.
Then I'm left right where i think i started.
Completely  amazed.

In a strange way, all the above has deepend my faith,
 If there is a spirit. That created the laws of nature, and all the twists and turns that life deals us.
Then I'm left right where i think i started.
Completely  amazed.

Oy vey iz mir.

re: Einstein

More here. Hes not a fan of the Abrahamic personal god, but doesn't seem to fall into the atheist category, either, kind of a pantheist a la Spinoza. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_...t_Einstein

Einstein re: atheism according to wikipedia via Time mag.
"[T]he fanatical atheists...are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against the traditional 'opium of the people'—cannot hear the music of the spheres."

Alright.. sounds like he fits in here! 

Regarding diets, recently, I have found success in increasing the DHA content of my diet. This is found in seafood mainly, less so in healthy animals (grass fed meat, free range chicken / eggs), and even less so in CAFO animals.

This is one area where vegetarian diets would be found lacking, as the body is not that great at converting ALA from sources such as flax seed into DHA, although it can be done. Additionally, there is a difference between eating carb-heavy sources (such as potatoes, corn, fruits, etc) vs the green leafy parts of the plant, for numerous reasons. One such reason is deuterium loading, which is a giant rabbit hole one can get into (see: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4733494/, or any of vids with deuterium depletion effects.)

You don't seem to have read the study all that carefully. The authors state (emphasis mine) that they've "offered the 7.3 billion number as though it’s a hedge. Averaging Davis and Archer seems like a way to be conservative". They go on to say, though, that, as they'll argue, they "haven’t hedged nearly enough" and that "[t]here are several reasons to question the accuracy of these calculations". Most importantly, they go on to conclude that "the estimate should be reduced: 7.3 billion is clearly too high".

So, no, Reece, 7.3 billion is not a "conservative" estimate. It's an upper limit - a very upper limit.

The authors go on to say that "we should have a fairly low level of confidence in whatever number we propose. There are too many reasons to be skeptical about generalizing from the available data, which is obviously quite limited in its own right". But more importantly, they make it clear that "we need to recognize that the 7.3 billion estimate rests on a number of philosophical assumptions, which are quite controversial".

The most relevant philosophical assumption to my mind is "the moral significance of predation. It turns out that many of the deaths associated with plant agriculture are not directly caused by machinery, poisons, or other direct human interventions. In the majority of cases, rather, what happens is that human activity exposes animals to predators, and those predators are the ones directly responsible for the deaths".

Why do I find this most relevant? Because those predators are going to find their meals wherever they can anyway, and the fact that they find them (more) easily due to exposure of prey via agricultural machinery does not make humans particularly culpable for the deaths of those prey. We can control what we eat; we can't control what obligate carnivores eat - they're going to eat something anyway.


Ridiculous, Ian. It's only vegans who miss out on vitamins and other important nutrients.

More seriously: yes, of course - and, not that you need to confirm so obvious a fact, it is elementary to confirm it via any of the various web apps that allow you to check the nutrient profiles of different foods; web apps such as https://nutritiondata.self.com/ and https://cronometer.com/ to name but two.


For those who are interested, here are both of T. Colin Campbell's responses to Denise Minger:

1. http://tynan.com/chinastudyresponse
   
2. http://www.vegsource.com/news/2010/07/ch...inger.html
   

Are these responses totally convincing? It's hard to judge, and they might not totally seem to be, but for me, the most important point is that despite it being the (publisher-mandated) title of his book, the China Study is only a small part of the overall evidence upon which he bases his conclusion that a plant-based diet is optimal for health. And no, I didn't like the paternalism of his reference to Denise as a "young girl", but then, I didn't like her imputations of his purported academic misconduct either.


Well, no, it doesn't. It reports of the Masai that (emphasis mine): "Dr. Mann, who published some of the early research, did an autopsy study of 50 Masai men and found that they had extensive atherosclerosis. They had disease (coronary intimal thickening) on par with older American men". Disease on par with older American men sounds to me like finding something "going on" with the Masai pretty much in line with expectations, rather than something being "brushed away".

It also reports of the Inuit that (footnotes elided; emphasis mine): "in 1940 the “father of epidemiology” in Greenland, Bertelsen, noted heart disease to be quite common, perhaps even more interesting given the young age of the population. He based this on clinical experience and medical officer reports going back for many decades. All told, the 2003 paper found “the hypothesis that mortality from ischemic heart disease is low among the Inuit compared with western populations insufficiently founded.” Further, “…a general statement that mortality from cardiovascular disease is high among the Inuit seems more warranted than the opposite.”" Not much "brushing away" there either.


So, did he look at the Okinawans? "Residents of Okinawa, the southernmost prefecture of Japan, are known for their long average life expectancy, high numbers of centenarians, and accompanying low risk of age-associated diseases".. and guess what? Their traditional diet is high in vegetables, high in legumes (mostly soy), moderate in fish, and low in meat/dairy consumption: in particular, it is 85% carbohydrate-based (mostly sweet potato). OK, so, it's not completely vegan, but then show me an even near-completely meat-eating society studied by Weston Price with a longevity and lack of age-associated disease comparable with the Okinawans...


There are no essential taxi-cabs either, so have fun walking twenty kilometres home on your next night out because you refuse non-essential yet readily-available sources of energy.


Maybe you can keep track of them and give us an update on their health a few years down the track - let us know how many of them have avoided cardiovascular incidents.


The key word there being "appear", and the missing words being "to me" and "for now".


Ah, yes. The author who condemns as "myths" that "meat-eating causes osteoporosis, kidney disease, heart disease, and cancer" and that "saturated fats and dietary cholesterol cause heart disease, atherosclerosis, and/or cancer, and low-fat, low-cholesterol diets are healthier for people", and then... dies of a stroke before the age of forty.

Funny also to note about Dr Robert Atkins of the "Atkins Diet" that "a medical report issued by the New York medical examiner's office a year after his death showed that Atkins had a history of heart attack, congestive heart failure and hypertension" (from Wikipedia; emphasis mine).

But no fair - those are just anecdotes.

True... so, peruse the last few pages of this thread and tell me what you find...

And those two are leaders of the "meat and dairy are good and healthy" brigade.

In response to the rest of the article, I quote “Brandolini’s Law”: “The amount of energy needed to refute [misinformation] is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”

I am not devoting that energy to the misinformation in that article - misinformation which, by the way, includes in many (but not all) cases the idea that any given "myth" is either (1) used by informed vegans to justify veganism and/or (2) taken seriously by informed vegans.


Because the more you spam it, the truer it becomes?


Although your question was directed to Brian, I'll answer it:

Really? At about a minute in it became obvious that the guy was obliviously repeating common misconceptions (deliberate lies?) about Ancel Keys. No need to watch further. He obviously has no idea what he's talking about. Please, inform yourself.

Stan Woolley, you actually "liked" that? For shame, man, for shame.

I wrote a full response to this about a couple weeks ago . . . but I'm not very savvy with this forum and how to quote and respond and such . . . so, my response looked pretty messy.  To make things worse, I couldn't do something as simple as delete dead space.  I have no idea why.  I still can't now when I go to the saved draft.  This greatly annoyed me after having spent so much time on it, so I cashed out.

So, all that's partly to say that I'm now returning to respond - again, but I'm only going to respond to one subject at a time . . .

First, and arbitrarily, let's look at Campbell's responses.  There aren't really "two" responses, it seems to me.  The first "response" is actually to someone else, what seems to be a blogger named, Tynan.  I looked through his blog and noticed there was a post from 13 years back that said he went vegan, showed great improvements in health (as I would predict, by the way), and that he would forever be vegan.  Then from 9 years ago, the same time as the post you linked to, he says that he's now eating meat again.  I just found that worth mentioning. 

And then yes, you linked to the only known response Campbell gave, which I mentioned.  Reading through his response, which admittedly I didn't fully read, I was reminded of something that Minger pointed out.  On the documentary Forks Over Knives, they display part of his research, presumably to bolster the vegan health position.  She points out, though, that the very thing they're displaying in the documentary says the exact opposite.  Quoting Minger:

Let that sink in for a moment. Maybe it’ll hit a little harder if I told you that in the “high protein vs. low protein” experiments discussed in this paper, 10 low-protein rats died prematurely while all the high-protein rats stayed alive. In other words, the overall survival rate for the 20% casein group was much better than for the 5% casein group, despite the fact they had liver tumors. The low-protein rats were dying rapidly—just not from liver cancer. And as we’ll see later, the reason the non-dead, low-protein rats didn’t get tumors was partly because their liver cells were committing mass suicide. 

Here's a link to her paper.  I'm not suggesting to anyone to read the whole thing, necessarily, but only to scroll down low enough to see the screen shot I'm talking about here . . . and to possibly read the next couple paragraphs . . . though, honestly, it's all rather engaging.

Link here

She next mentions the Indian paper that Campbell is pulling from, and how it's somewhat deceitful what he left out and what it implied:

Regarding that paper from India that sparked Campbell’s “aha protein evil!” moment, Chris [Masterjohn] notes that “Campbell never tells us … that these Indian researchers actually published this paper as part of a two-paper set, one showing that low-casein diets make aflatoxin much more acutely toxic to rats.” This second paper is called The Effect of Dietary Protein on Liver Injury in Weanling Rats, and indeed, it shows that rats on low-protein diets experience much more actual liver damage than rats on high-protein diets when they’re exposed to aflatoxin. They don’t get cancer, but they’re sicker overall because they’re less capable of detoxifying aflatxoin—leading to fun stuff like fatty liver, liver necrosis (cell death), proliferation of bile duct tissue, and early death. As Chris puts it:

Somehow, I doubt many people would read this study and shout “sign me up!” for a low-protein, plant-based diet if it is going to save them from cancer at the expense of killing them in their youth.

At any rate, there's a lot that neither of us can easily go through.  There's an entire book, The China Study, and there are multiple responses.  There's certainly a lot to wade through.  Let me just tell anyone else following these responses this: I was a 110% believer in "plant-based diets" when Forks Over Knives came out or when I became aware of Campbell and The China Study.  I, too, believed them.  People became vegetarian at my suggestion!  But having even slightly perused the objections with an open mind, I was shocked at how wrong I was.  If you're considering a plant based diet for health reasons, then I advise checking out the objections . . . and reading through them is simply better than my paltry summaries.  The above is meant to be a little taste.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

What next? 

Let me try to address the Maasai, the Inuit and Weston Price. 

How do I do this?  The substantiation of the health of these peoples was well documented.  I have been familiar with this ongoing debate between vegan/meat eaters for a long, long time and I have never, ever heard anyone suggest that the people he studied who had abnormal amounts of people living to be over 100 were actually riddled with heart disease.  So, I don't really know what I'm responding to since we need to know exactly what the people were eating that your guy autopsied, right?  And when was this done?  I tried my damnedest to google this, but to no avail.  I did find it being said that there were problems with the Inuit in later years, but the problem was their diet had changed, which is what I suspect is going on here.  During the time the Inuit were claimed to be examples of bad health, I read they were eating these things, in this order:

1. Coffee and tea
2. Sugar
3. Whitebread, rools, crackers
4. Fish
5. Margarine
6. White rice
7. Tang and Kool-aid
8. Butter
9. Regular soft drinks
10. Milk (whole and evaporated)

What I read from Price years ago (and have never heard challenged) also came from doctors that knew some of the indigenous peoples.  Such as these guy, Dr. Romig:

[Dr. Romig] stated that in his thirty-six years of contact with these people he had never seen a case of malignant disease among the truly primitive Eskimos and Indians, although it frequently occurs when they become modernized."

They were pretty much all, though I don't believe completely 100%, this way. 

Though, as an anthropology major, and in a context completely unrelated to this debate, we learned that heart disease and cancer surfaced with the agricultural revolution.  I wonder what they were eating before the agri-revolution?  Were they scavenging the ground for carrots and broccoli?  No, our ancestors hunted game. 

I would mention a couple other items about Price: we went through some of this, however briefly, back on the Skeptiko site.  I don't know if you remember.  I do, though.  If my memory's correct, you changed mid stream, when I introduced this stuff - not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that.  You changed - if I remember correct - from suggesting that meat was bad to then arguing that we can now, with all the supplements we have, make it without meat (and, I guess, still be as healthy as those peoples Price studied) and that we have a moral obligation to do so in the modern age.  Out of cautiousness I'm including the "if I remember correct" caveat in case it turns out it reads different to someone else (who hypothetically takes the time to find it), but that conversation was lodged in mind and illustrated just how much weight Weston Price studies carried.  After all, you have to argue, which now I guess you're trying to do, that all those folks who were perfectly healthy looking, had perfect weight each and every one, had perfect dental health and (most incredibly!) perfect dental arches - something completely unseen today, and were reported by all associated with them, including doctors when available, to be completely free of chronic, modern disease, with abnormal amounts of them living beyond 100, were nevertheless secretly harboring the same ol'
chronic diseases we have.  I find this hard to believe in light of everything else we know, have heard and can visibly see with these peoples . . . Can you link to more info on these autopsies?

Bringing up supplements is a big subject, but I'll just suggest to those reading along that almost all vegans acknowledge that veganism is incomplete and requires supplementation.  And this brings up the very real problem of supplement absorption - it seems to almost never be sufficient . . . but I'll save that for later, I suppose.

Here's a little more on differences in teeth health between 95% meat eaters and vegetarians

Harvard Crimson

And again, if the correlation between dental health and chronic disease is true, well . . .