.

[Ego]

Ugh! The author's credentials:

"Nina Teicholz has written for Gourmet magazine, The New Yorker, The Economist, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. She also reported for National Public Radio. She lives in New York with her husband and two sons."

Meanwhile we have real physicians, the people treating the diseases promoted by Nina's Gourmet magazine articles who say the exact opposite and comment on her book here.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/06/health/sa ... at-debate/

You can't go broke telling people what they want to hear. At least not financially broke. Morally broke? That's another story.

[RealPerson]

Ugh! The author's credentials:

"Nina Teicholz has written for Gourmet magazine, The New Yorker, The Economist, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. She also reported for National Public Radio. She lives in New York with her husband and two sons."

Meanwhile we have real physicians, the people treating the diseases promoted by Nina's Gourmet magazine articles who say the exact opposite and comment on her book here.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/06/health/sa ... at-debate/

You can't go broke telling people what they want to hear. At least not financially broke. Morally broke? That's another story.

Indeed. A strict vegan diet is the ONLY diet that has ever been proven to reverse cardiovascular diease. See Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn's clinical research. Cardiologists know this, but most people prefer pills over a challenging diet.

[riparian]

Eh. Look at the actual research data in the China Study and the Framingham Study. It speaks for itself (and for the honesty of the "researchers").

[Felix]

This is a detailed (and very long) discussion of the meat and fat are healthy arguments common in the low-carb world (Taubes, Cordain, Minger, Colpo, etc.).

http://www.plantpositive.com/

It's pretty devastating.

[Dragline]

So what do you make of people who have formerly been followers or even advocates of your chosen eating regimen (here, vegetarianism or veganism -- but it could be anyone's idea of dietary perfection) and have developed illnesses or other health problems until they stopped doing what you advocate? Dr. Terry Wahls is a good example of this on veganism, but there are legions of others.

What is your explanation for these people? Are they all liars? Deluded? Too stupid or lazy to follow your guidelines correctly? Genetic mutants who need to be culled from humanity?

Or perhaps the idea that there is one form of eating regimen that is always appropriate for everyone is simply a fallacy, and you need to figure out what works best for you.

[Felix]

Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't the Wahls protocol center around 9 cups of fruits n veg daily as the core component of rehabilitative magic? Isn't that a large step in the direction of a whole food plant based diet? Regarding MS the dietary protocol that has beat them all so far in the scientific literature is the Swank diet, which emphasizes low saturated fat intake:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-mvh23M3fU

Also, taking Wahls' paleo recommendations, removing gluten grains, actually all starches -apparently even unrefined ones - , dairy and legumes is not equally restrictive?

The paleo and low-carb argument usually takes a diet based on highly processed foods like white flour products, refined sugar and vegetable oil as the main calorie sources as the baseline and argues against that. Calling it a gluten-containing high-carb diet as the defining features is quite a stretch. This is precisely what Wahls does. This is not what the health-argument for a whole food plant based diet is arguing for. Yes, there are shitty vegan diets. You can be vegan on french fries twizzlers and coca cola. But nobody is arguing for that.

If you can find studies of people who emphasize whole plant foods in their diet (a healthy form of an actual gluten-containing high-carb diet )), usually you end up with blue zones with lots of healthy people living to a long age. Apart from special cases of celiac disease sufferers (1% or 1.5% of the population if you count people with milder intolerance, too) you probably cannot find people on such diets suffering horrible health problems. If so I'd really like to know. I do not believe they exist.

Those who claim this usually have a book to sell.

The main problem I see is that the whole nutrition thing is a religion-replacement which completely ruins any discussion on the topic.

Also maybe the only people who can fully stick to such restrictive regimens like paleo or vegan (or low-carb, or low-fat, or gluten-free, or sugar-free, or starch free, or organic, or raw, or only BigMacs, or juicing, or high-protein, or zerocarb, or macrobiotic, etc.) in an environment abundant with extremely tasty food, lots of it processed and breaking all these nice rules, have some degree of eating disorder to begin with.

I still do not see how this validates the notion that basing your diet heavily on saturated fat and lots of animal products is the key to health, though. I see the cholesterol sceptics like I see climate sceptics. Adding confusion to what is basically pretty clear science because it would be nice if it were not so.

I'd concede that a high-animal-fat diet with lots of vegetables is healthier than the SAD. But that isn't really saying much.

[Ego]

So what do you make of people who have formerly been followers or even advocates of your chosen eating regimen (here, vegetarianism or veganism -- but it could be anyone's idea of dietary perfection) and have developed illnesses or other health problems until they stopped doing what you advocate? Dr. Terry Wahls is a good example of this on veganism, but there are legions of others.

Well, I have to admit, I agree with the point that no diet is right for every single human being. That said, I do believe there are some diets that are wrong for everyone.

Dr. Wahls was not a vegan. She lived on a farm and milked cows in the morning before going to school. Link from her website:

When I became a medical student, I lived on beans, rice, whole-grain bread, eggs, cheese, pasta, potatoes, vegetables, and fruit. I believed that fat and protein were necessary for my high-energy lifestyle. My multiple sclerosis symptoms began during medical school, long before my diagnosis, but I ignored them.

She continues in the Mindbodygreen article by explaining what changes she decided to make.

I began experimenting on myself, and one of my first discoveries was the work of Dr. Ashton Embry, who had connected diet to multiple sclerosis. Nobody had ever suggested to me that there could be any connection between multiple sclerosis and diet (the mainstream medical literature continues to deny the connection).

Dr. Embry’s son had multiple sclerosis, and he wrote that a diet without grains or dairy products that included meat could have a dramatic effect on MS progression.

I believe (I use that word purposely, believe) that milk is a trigger for many auto-immune illnesses for some people. Wahls ate milk products (and presumably drank milk) and got MS. She eliminated them and the symptoms of MS went away.

There is evidence of a correlation between cows milk consumption and MS.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1291895

[RealPerson]

There is evidence of a correlation between cows milk consumption and MS.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1291895

An NIH reference? I am impressed.

I didn't know that there are multiple types of casein, as discussed here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12601419

The endless tinkering of the food industry with our food, makes it even more difficult to draw reliable conclusions. The genetic makeup of our food keeps changing to respond to consumer demand and optimize profits.

As far as different people responding differently to food: Esselstyne's entire cohort of subjects responded very positively to the same diet. They owed their life to it, for the 12 years of the study. Not bad when you know they were sent home to die. Not bad for people with so much uncontrolled angina that they could barely get out of bed.

I think there is some truth to the comment that the food industry is now where the tobacco industry was in the 1950s. Doctors back then were telling patients to smoke so they could relax. In fact, doctors were smoking in their office during the consults. Big tobacco eventually failed to keep the truth under wraps, but killed millions in the process of posing continuous legal challenges for decades. To me, this is truly criminal behavior. Disinformation everywhere, with talking heads without scientific proof. There is a remarkable similarity to the food debate today.

[Dragline]

The paleo and low-carb argument usually takes a diet based on highly processed foods like white flour products, refined sugar and vegetable oil as the main calorie sources as the baseline and argues against that. Calling it a gluten-containing high-carb diet as the defining features is quite a stretch. This is precisely what Wahls does. This is not what the health-argument for a whole food plant based diet is arguing for. Yes, there are shitty vegan diets. You can be vegan on french fries twizzlers and coca cola. But nobody is arguing for that.

If you can find studies of people who emphasize whole plant foods in their diet (a healthy form of an actual gluten-containing high-carb diet )), usually you end up with blue zones with lots of healthy people living to a long age. Apart from special cases of celiac disease sufferers (1% or 1.5% of the population if you count people with milder intolerance, too) you probably cannot find people on such diets suffering horrible health problems. If so I'd really like to know. I do not believe they exist.

The main problem I see is that the whole nutrition thing is a religion-replacement which completely ruins any discussion on the topic.

What you are describing in the first paragraph is exactly the approach taken in most vegan/vegetarian advocacy -- Forks over Knives is a good example, under which SAD suddenly = all animal products half-way through the movie.

People do argue for shitty vegan/vegetarian diets. i know some of them, including some who have never eaten an animal product in their lives and have health issues.

Those people you don't think exist actually do exist. You can even find them on the internet. Do you deny their humanity?

I agree that nutrition = religion for many people. The technical term is orthorexia.

I like Michael Pollan's advice -- its rooted in practicality and experience, is not based on one culture and is not religious/orthorexic: See http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/news/ ... for-eating

Neither angry paleo or angry vegan. Interestingly, you can find similar advice if you read works from the 19th century or even old Jack Lalanne videos from the 1950s. None of this is new.

But I recommend you get your DNA analyzed. It will tell you about your tolerance or intolerance for milk products, gluten, olive oil and many other things. For example for me, I have a genetic propensity towards gout. I can control it by drinking fresh squeezed lemon or lime juice almost every day, which paradoxically reduces the acidity of my system. It works for me. But I would not recommend it for other people who don't have my DNA.

[Dragline]

Esselstyne's entire cohort of subjects responded very positively to the same diet. They owed their life to it, for the 12 years of the study. Not bad when you know they were sent home to die. Not bad for people with so much uncontrolled angina that they could barely get out of bed.

Esseltyne's cohort were all people who had previously had a coronary event and were largely overweight and eating god knows what. As he promotes himself: "The patients in Dr. Esselstyn’s initial study came to him with advanced coronary artery disease." Why should any of that be extrapolated to everyone else in the world? Because it sells a lot of books, eh? http://www.dresselstyn.com/

He should have run his experiments on perfectly healthy people. This is why his results are contraindicated by other studies. A lot of it is related to what you start with. I don't have advanced coronary artery disease and am not prone to it based on my DNA. Do you have it?

[RealPerson]

No argument on the selling of books, although it is hardly a bestseller on Amazon at rank 9,987.

Doing experiments on healthy people would mean following them for many decades. Nobody can dismiss the astonishing results he achieved with a very sick population. You could argue that these patients were obviously susceptible to heart disease. You could also argue that someone who is not susceptible to diseases can eat an unhealthy diet. That is akin to the story about "my grandpa ate bacon every day, put butter on his bread, smoked like a chimney and lived to be a 100." Possible, but not likely for most of us.

The DNA studies are interesting. It is just such a complex and still emerging field. I suspect it will be quite a while before we can draw firm conclusions. The human genome project revealed that we have far fewer genes than previously believed. Consequently, interactions between multiple genes are needed to run our biochemical processes, resulting in a far more complex system than previously thought.

One final comment of the vegan diet. You can eat an extremely unhealthy vegan diet. Esselstyne advocates a healthy plant based diet. He even advocates "water sauteeing" to avoid using any oils. This is not a coca cola and pretzel diet.

[Ego]

It should be required that anyone who makes a health claim in their lifetime must submit to an autopsy after death. I am curious about Seth Roberts cause of death. It was reported that at the time of his death Atkins was obese had a history of heart attack, congestive heart failure and was hypertensive, but his widow adamantly refused an autopsy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/nyreg ... alive.html

I hope the plant-based advocates put their money where their mouths are when their clocks stop ticking. T Colin Campbell and Caldwell Esselstyn are both 80. John McDougall is 67. Neal Bernard is Dorian Gray at 61.

[Dragline]

No argument on the selling of books, although it is hardly a bestseller on Amazon at rank 9,987.

Doing experiments on healthy people would mean following them for many decades. Nobody can dismiss the astonishing results he achieved with a very sick population. You could argue that these patients were obviously susceptible to heart disease. You could also argue that someone who is not susceptible to diseases can eat an unhealthy diet. That is akin to the story about "my grandpa ate bacon every day, put butter on his bread, smoked like a chimney and lived to be a 100." Possible, but not likely for most of us.

The DNA studies are interesting. It is just such a complex and still emerging field. I suspect it will be quite a while before we can draw firm conclusions. The human genome project revealed that we have far fewer genes than previously believed. Consequently, interactions between multiple genes are needed to run our biochemical processes, resulting in a far more complex system than previously thought.

One final comment of the vegan diet. You can eat an extremely unhealthy vegan diet. Esselstyne advocates a healthy plant based diet. He even advocates "water sauteeing" to avoid using any oils. This is not a coca cola and pretzel diet.

His patients were not just "susceptible to heart disease". They all had coronary events. They were a distinct and unique population, and quite unlike most other people.

I am not arguing that someone else can eat a quote "unhealthy diet", whatever that means. I am arguing that a healthy diet may be different for different individuals and need not be the orthorexic and ridiculously restricted diet suggested. Water sauteeing? Exemplifies my point -- that is orthorexic and unnecessary for almost everyone who is otherwise healthy. As much made up as the people saying everyone should definitely eat butter every day. BS 1 and BS 2.

DNA analysis is here and now. New discoveries are being made almost every day. But its causing a lot of cognitive dissonance for a lot of people, so they simply pretend it does not exist and fall back on their favorite generalities, whether they be paleoish, veganish or something elseish.

[RealPerson]

His patients were not just "susceptible to heart disease". They all had coronary events. They were a distinct and unique population, and quite unlike most other people.

I am not arguing that someone else can eat a quote "unhealthy diet", whatever that means. I am arguing that a healthy diet may be different for different individuals and need not be the orthorexic and ridiculously restricted diet suggested. Water sauteeing? Exemplifies my point -- that is orthorexic and unnecessary for almost everyone who is otherwise healthy. As much made up as the people saying everyone should definitely eat butter every day. BS 1 and BS 2.

DNA analysis is here and now. New discoveries are being made almost every day. But its causing a lot of cognitive dissonance for a lot of people, so they simply pretend it does not exist and fall back on their favorite generalities, whether they be paleoish, veganish or something elseish.

Most people are susceptible to heart disease. It is the number one killer in the US. I do agree that not everyone needs the diet that Esselstyn recommends, but it is an insurance policy for those willing to put up with it. Esselstyn says: "some people call my diet extreme, but I think having your chest cracked open to suture leg veins to your heart is extreme".

I am intrigued by your DNA analysis comments. I would love to hear more specifics about it. What studies are being ordered and how are they being interpreted.

[Felix]

None of the doctors in Forks over knives prescribes a diet based on processed foods. This is actually the one thing they all (well, except the zerocarbers whose hero had cancer and heart disease) agree on, paleo, vegan - Pollan's first point is eat food, the second is mostly plants.

The vegans go a step further also eliminating animal products based on the very solid evidence on the connection with heart disease, which affects all of us and kills one in 3 people in the western world.

I would doubt that outside of acute disease these measures need to be taken that far (although they can). I am not sure if there is much evidence for a difference long term between a 100℅ and a 90% whole plants diet.

But there seems to be a dose-response relationship.

The people advocating shitty vegan diets do this for animal protection where it is okay to eat anything as long as it isn't animal based to save the animals. That is a very different argument.

The health arguments including Pollan's, argue for more whole plant foods. Arguing to base your diet on butter, lard and animal prducts as the main ingredient without which health is impossible as advocated by Taubes, Atkins, and the author OP is referring to goes into a very different direction than saying that having some meat and cheese in your mainly whole plants diet and using olive oil is fine as long as you are healthy in general.

One thing that is completely neglected in all these discussions and a main monkey wrench in all studies on the topic are the other factors of exercise, mental attitude and social environment, which have major effects on overall health regardless of diet.

[7Wannabe5]

Well, one thing I know is that my 98 year old neighbor who still lives on her own and gardens all day long puts more than a bit too much rum in her tiramisu.

[Chad]

One thing that is completely neglected in all these discussions and a main monkey wrench in all studies on the topic are the other factors of exercise, mental attitude and social environment, which have major effects on overall health regardless of diet.

Absolutely. It seems obvious that our bodies can handle a certain amount of bad stress without any major problems being created, but when we have severe amounts of stress from extended periods of poor exercise, mental attitude, social environment, and diet our bodies start to break down. I would also toss in pollution, specifically air pollution and maybe even light and sound pollution.

It's interesting that most of the "blue zones" are in areas where society and geography help to create solid exercise, mental attitudes, and a strong social environment, with limited pollution of the types I mentioned above. Then you toss in some form of what I list below and you have a rather successful formula.

I don't see any one diet being the answer and most extreme diets such as vegan/vegetarianism, Paleo, Atkins, etc. all have major holes in them.

It seems obvious that you should eliminate all processed food and eat whole fruits, vegetables, nuts, and meat that has been properly raised (i.e. cows are grassfed, etc.), while limiting, but by no means eliminating carbs from whole food sources....done. This probably gets you to 80-90% and then you would need DNA testing of the type suggested by Dragline if you wanted to get the last 10-20%.

I'm very interested in stuff like this over the next few years:

http://www.wired.com/2014/06/a-beautifu ... he-doctor/

And, the new fitness trackers that will be coming to market in the next year. Of course, they need to live up to the hype to be useful.

[Dragline]

I am intrigued by your DNA analysis comments. I would love to hear more specifics about it. What studies are being ordered and how are they being interpreted.

I had mine done through 23andme before the FDA crack down on them last November-- evidently, the FDA disapproves of providing people with information about themselves they just might be able to use. Research is ongoing as to which markers mean what, and keeps getting updated.

My genetic markers showed that I have elevated risk for gout, kidney stones, rheumatoid arthritis and Parkinson's, but have much lower than average risk for coronary heart disease, Alzheimer's, and digestive tract issues like Crohn's or celiac.

Regarding fat consumption for me, preliminary studies of three known markers shows:

"A low fat diet may lead to increased waist circumference but a diet high in monounsaturated fat protects against increased waist circumference and may lead to reductions in BMI;"

"Typical odds of obesity on both a high and low saturated fat diet;" and

"Dietary fat consumption is not associated with changes in BMI."

Characteristically, no one in my family has ever had a coronary issue unless they were a smoker, regardless of what they ate. But people with my make-up usually do well on Mediterranean-style diets.

[Dragline]

Well, one thing I know is that my 98 year old neighbor who still lives on her own and gardens all day long puts more than a bit too much rum in her tiramisu.

My father is on his way to that kind of reality, although he's "only" 85.

[RealPerson]

I am intrigued by your DNA analysis comments. I would love to hear more specifics about it. What studies are being ordered and how are they being interpreted.

-- evidently, the FDA disapproves of providing people with information about themselves they just might be able to use.

No kidding. The FDA has killed many patients by needlessly delaying the introduction of life saving drugs. They are all about making themselves look good. Patient health and well being is very low on their list of priorities.